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The Future of Humanitarian Design (HUD) is a research platform exploring critical yet pragmatic material, technological, and architectural interventions for violence prevention across global and local humanitarian spaces . . .
WHY?
Humanitarianism is in trouble. The crises it addresses are now more complex, protracted, and politicised. But political forces are increasingly unsympathetic, failing to adequately support humanitarian actors. Within this context, humanitarianism is undergoing a dramatic shift as it accelerates the integration of technology and ʻdesignʼ practices into its work. This also faces difficulties. The integration of – for instance – machine learning techniques into humanitarian action is criticised for further distancing humanitarians from beneficiaries, reducing human beings to data-points, simply pixels on a satellite image. Equally, partnerships with commercial actors to improve – say – the architectural design of refugee shelters are criticised for subjecting humanitarianism to market logics. Nonetheless, humanitarian design is here to stay, especially as a tactic for mitigating the socio-political challenges the field faces. The demand of the day is thus simple: to excavate a series of hidden – critical yet pragmatic, speculative yet functional – futures for humanitarian design.
WHAT?
HUD explores humanitarian design through a radical transdisciplinary and transvocational ethos, synthesizing the insights of social scientists, architects, development engineers, and practitioners. We focus our research on violence prevention in three contexts: detention settings; situations of forced mobility, and aid compounds. We do so with a global perspective but conduct core collaborative research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia. HUDʼs ultimate goal is to design material, technological, and architectural interventions that transcend the binaries that currently divide humanitarian design. Namely, we seek to develop interventions that are neither entirely critical nor entirely pragmatic, neither entirely politicized nor entirely depoliticized, neither entirely global (ʼone size fits allʼ) nor entirely parochial. Instead, HUD seeks to open up different futures that disrupt such binaries in humanitarian design.
Find out more about HUD’s research here.
WHO?
HUDʼs core research is led through a collaboration between the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne. HUDʼs work also integrates humanitarian practitioners from leading organizations and key partnerships with research institutions in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our work is supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia grant. HUD is also cultivating a wider research collective drawing on the insights of scholars, practitioners, and civil society groups who push the boundaries of humanitarian design. Indeed, HUD is an open and experimental initiative. We embrace an agile approach to integrating the needs of diverse, sometimes conflictual, stakeholders, as well as an openness to taking risks and shifting directions to better explore the many possible futures for humanitarian design.
Find out more about HUD’s core team here.
