In May 2024, HUD curated its first public symposium, attended by leading social scientists, architects, and practitioners whose work explores the connections between technology, aesthetics, humanitarianism, and more. The event was an opportunity for HUD’s core team to engage in a series of conversations with those experts, expanding the horizons of what constitute the different possible futures for humanitarian design. The event was co-organized by the University of Copenhagen, HEAD Genève, the Geneva Graduate Institute, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne. During the symposium, participants explored the following thematics:
Problems // Provocations
Why is humanitarian design so naïve? Why is it accused of ignoring the root causes of humanitarian crisis? Why does it adhere so closely to the ‘oligarchical’ logics of the electronic age? Why do the good – critical – inclinations of those involved in humanitarian design so frequently translate into interventions that, at best, do not fit with the contexts they are designed for or, worse, create new problems? Why do the intended beneficiaries of humanitarian design so frequently reject its work? Should we abolish humanitarian design?
Practices // Pragmatics
What is humanitarian design? And what might it become? How does it juggle between the material, the aesthetic, and the technological? What are the power relationships between those that design and those who are designed for? What practices can elide continued imbalances between the global north and the global south in this respect? Practically and pragmatically, how does (or does not) humanitarian design cultivate transdisciplinary and transvocational contributions to its goals?
Contexts // Cases
Concretely, what kind of cases and contexts does humanitarian design currently address? Who are its ‘users’ or ‘beneficiaries’? What contexts does it principally engage, and why? What is the difference between designing for those who suffer from humanitarian crisis and those who cause such crises? What alternative genealogies of humanitarian design exist? What alternative practices do they engage? Why?
Futures // Failures
Are there more radical ways of designing humanitarian design able to elide the concerns of its critics and the failures of its past and present? Can humanitarian design contribute to emancipatory political processes without neglecting the pragmatic need to alleviate suffering and prevent harm in the here-and-now? What theories, concepts, practices, and methods must we develop to shift the trajectory of humanitarian design?
FULL PROGRAM
A copy of the short program for the symposium can be found below, you can also download a full program (with abstracts) here.
Keynotes
The HUD symposium featured four public keynotes from Samia Henni (ETH Zurich), Peter Redfield (University of Southern California), Juan David Reina-Rozo (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Tom Scott-Smith (Oxford University). You can watch videos of their keynote addresses below.
