In economic geography, it has become widely acknowledged that untraded social relations with clients, rivals and related industries are vital for the knowledge creation of economic actors. This has been used to explain economic success in agglomerated economies on the basis of untraded interdependencies. This paper engages in these debates through empirical examination of untraded interdependencies in knowledge creating relations in industrial design in Copenhagen. The paper argues, however, that a weakness in most existing studies of knowledge creation in agglomerated economies is a lack of empirical evidence for how such social relations are constructed and what their spatial implications are. It therefore suggests that analyses of the socio-spatial relations of knowledge creation in specific industries are undertaken through the analytical framework provided by recent studies of typologies of knowledge bases. In addition, it promotes an inter-relational approach based on a social anthropological understanding of knowledge creation to explore how the different roles of untraded interdependencies in knowledge creation vary in different industries.