Design Equality with Innovation (2025 Historical Reference: Closed)

Design Equality with Innovation (2025 Historical Reference: Closed)

Design Equality with Innovation is closed. BE OPEN’s official competition site records the 2025/2026 submission window as opening on September 15, 2025 and closing on February 28, 2026. The official site now presents the winners, and BE OPEN’s own announcements name all five prize recipients. This page preserves the completed cycle for reference; it is not a live application route.

The official sources checked for this update do not announce a successor Design Equality entry round. The competition archive is still specifically labeled DESIGN EQUALITY 2025, while BE OPEN’s current site and news pages list other activity without publishing a successor call for this programme. Do not infer a future deadline from the completed timetable. If BE OPEN opens another edition, it should be confirmed through a new announcement on the organiser’s site or a newly published competition page.

Verified status and award structure

The €15,000 total is the sum of the five cash awards listed on the official competition page: €5,000, €3,000, €2,000, €3,000, and €2,000. The rules also describe travel support connected with an award ceremony: €1,000 for an individual winner and a maximum of €2,500 for a winning team. That travel grant was separate from the five cash prizes, conditional on the ceremony arrangements, and intended to partially cover transport, accommodation, travel insurance, or a visa. It should not be described as a general grant available to entrants.

The official rules say that a prize is paid to the named winner, or to the lead entrant when a team wins, who is then responsible for any distribution within the team. They also say the award is non-transferable and that winners are responsible for any taxes that may apply. The sources confirm the award amounts and the names of the winners; they do not provide evidence in the checked pages for describing every payment as completed, so this archive does not make that stronger claim.

What the competition asked designers to address

The programme was connected to the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and to the Sustainable Development Goals, especially gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. BE OPEN described the competition as an international design competition for innovative solutions, rather than a narrow product-design award. The brief welcomed work that could advance gender equality, address the needs of women and girls, promote women as innovators and entrepreneurs, and remove barriers affecting women and girls in innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Entrants were asked to relate their submission to one of three categories:

1. Solutions to advocate and advance gender equality.
2. Solutions that meet the needs of women and girls.
3. Solutions to promote women as innovators and entrepreneurs.

The categories were broad enough to accommodate products, services, technology-driven concepts, and other design-led proposals. The official wording also connected the programme with sustainability and the SDGs, so a strong entry needed more than a general statement of support for equality. It needed a defined problem, a proposed intervention, and a credible explanation of how the work could help its intended users.

The competition’s published results show the range of work that was considered. Norah Kimathi’s Zerobionic is described as an AI-powered robotic exoskeleton intended to improve access to STEM education for deaf and hard-of-hearing girls. Victress Igboanusim’s Calyx-Probe is a handheld AI-powered diagnostic device designed to improve access to non-invasive reproductive healthcare. Lennox Omondi and his team submitted Ecobana, a circular manufacturing project that transforms banana agricultural waste into biodegradable sanitary pads for women and girls in underserved communities.

The other two winning projects came through the public and founder-selected awards. Akshat Shah, Harshavi Patel, and Aryaa Bhagwat won the Public Vote for Samvaad Saathi, a service that guides women daily-wage construction workers through steps related to financial autonomy, including gathering documents, opening bank accounts, registering for pension and welfare schemes, and understanding earnings and savings options. The Founder’s Choice went to Ellena Vianne, Tria Indah Lestari, Farida Doa Valentina, and Adnan Hasyim Wibowo for the Roots Menstrual Care System, designed for tropical rainforest conditions and the Orang Rimba indigenous community in Sumatra’s Bukit Duabelas National Park.

These projects are useful evidence about the completed competition, but they are not a promise that a future edition will use the same judging priorities or categories. Anyone preparing for a later BE OPEN call would need to read that call’s own brief.

Eligibility and entry format

The official About page states that the competition was open internationally to students, graduates, and young professionals aged 18–35. This was a participant-status and age requirement for the completed cycle. The page does not describe the programme as restricted to one nationality, one continent, or one academic discipline.

Applicants could enter as individuals or as part of a multidisciplinary team. An individual could submit one individual project and one team project, for a maximum of two projects entered by that person. The rules say there was no limit to the number of members in a team. Participants were encouraged to seek academic or professional mentorship, advice, or sponsorship, and supporting organisations could be named alongside a project when included in publicity materials.

The entry had to be original. The official submission form required the entrant to confirm that the individual or team held the intellectual property for the submission and had the right to enter and publish the work. That is an important distinction for collaborative student work: being involved in a project was not enough if the entrant could not make the required rights confirmation.

How the closed application process worked

The following steps describe the official process for the completed cycle only:

1. Choose the entry structure and category. An entrant selected an individual or team submission and related the project to one of the three published categories. A team could be multidisciplinary and could include any number of members under the stated rules.
2. Prepare the project material before registration is finished. The submission portal instructed contestants to prepare supporting visuals and documents in advance. The official site did not promise an editing period after publication, so the project description, images, supporting files, and rights information needed to be checked before the final action.
3. Register or log in to the personal area. The competition’s submission portal was my.designequality2025.com. It instructed contestants to use its Registration form to enter the competition and submit their work, then to log in or register to use the personal account.
4. Complete the required profile and project information. The form requested the entrant’s name or the team members’ names, academic institution, course and discipline, institution website, phone number, social-media, website, or portfolio link, and a short CV or additional information. The portal also required the original-work and intellectual-property confirmation.
5. Review everything and publish the entry. The portal warned that after the form was completed and the entrant pressed Publish, corrections could not be made. It also limited each person to one individual and/or one team project, matching the rules on the official About page.
6. Use the listed contact for technical questions. The portal gave [email protected] for difficulties with the submission process. That address is retained here as part of the historical instructions, not as evidence that the 2025/2026 form is still accepting entries.

The deadline for that process was February 28, 2026. Since the deadline has passed and the official pages now announce the winners, there is no late-submission instruction to provide. A visitor should not register on the old portal expecting a new opportunity, and should not substitute the earlier January date that appeared on some third-party listings for the official February 28 deadline.

Judging, public voting, and winner notification

The official About page says the jury would select the top 50 honourable mentions and then choose the First, Second, and Third Prize winners from the strongest submissions across the three categories. The Public Vote winner was selected by the majority of votes in an online open vote from the 50 honourable mentions. The Founder’s Choice was allocated by BE OPEN founder Elena Baturina from that group. Competition partners could also decide to give non-cash prizes to submitted projects.

The public vote was therefore a separate route from the main jury prizes. The official BE OPEN news page dated May 29, 2026 announced the First, Second, Third, and Public Vote winners. A second official announcement dated June 5, 2026 named the Founder’s Choice winner as well. The competition homepage now displays all five results, so the award stage is complete even though the original timeline had described the winner announcement as March to April 2026 and the celebration of winners as to be confirmed.

The rules said winners would be notified by email about their prize category or honourable mention and would need to confirm acceptance. If a selected entrant failed to confirm within 14 days after BE OPEN made contact, the rules said the entrant would be treated as having relinquished the prize and the award could be given to another entrant. That rule belongs to the closed cycle and is not an invitation to submit now.

What to retain from this archive

This page is most useful to someone checking an old opportunity listing, studying the completed winners, or preparing a project for a possible future BE OPEN competition. The durable facts are that the programme was international, focused on gender equality and related SDG work, accepted individual and multidisciplinary team projects from participants aged 18–35, and offered five cash prizes totaling €15,000. The closed cycle’s actual deadline was February 28, 2026.

The next-cycle question remains unresolved by the official sources reviewed here. There is no confirmed Design Equality application date to place in the metadata, and the programme does not genuinely accept applications continuously. The archive therefore keeps the real closing date and is explicitly marked as historical. For a future opportunity, check the official competition site and BE OPEN’s announcements rather than copying the old deadline, categories, form fields, or prize amounts forward.

Official sources checked: DESIGN EQUALITY 2025, its About and rules page, the BE OPEN winner announcement of May 29, 2026, and the BE OPEN announcement of June 5, 2026.