The Future of Humanitarian Design is a research collective working to bridge the social, engineering, and architectural sciences to address urgent needs in some of the most severe situations of humanitarian crisis globally. To do so, HUD’s team draws on a critical yet pragmatic ethos of evidence-based and context-sensitive codesign.

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. Getting there requires a transformation of how we think about the interconnected challenges facing humanitarianism, development, and peace-building globally. Planetary conditions are radically shifting, transforming the relationship between humans, technology, nature, and politics, requiring we think differently about humanitarianism and its design. More, the politicized history of humanitarian action and development demands a deep sensitivity to colonial legacies, global economic exploitation, and related power structures. HUD nurtures a collaborative ecosystem that faces these challenges from the ground, making small steps towards a different future for humanitarian design.

In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, HUD’s Jonathan Luke Austin is working towards the participatory re-design of prison and detention spaces with key figures from local research institutions, civil society, architecture institutes, and beyond. All photos: Jonathan Luke Austin.

What?

HUD’s core research and practice explores the place of design, engineering, and architecture through the lens of three main thematic focal points, and a series of diverse sub-projects.

Where?

HUD engages these three research foci through extensive on-the-ground research with core stakeholders in two key humanitarian contexts.

How?

HUD’s work is based on a mix of deep empirical research and cutting edge theroetical engagement from across the social, engineering, and architectural sciences, as well as the embrace of context-sensitive, south-south, decolonial, and related approaches to transforming humanitarian action.

HUD explores humanitarian design through a radical transdisciplinary and transvocational ethos, synthesizing the insights of social scientists, architects, development engineers, and practitioners. 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. In all this, HUD is a radical experiment in both transdisciplinary and transvocational research. It begins from the proposition that if humanitarian design is here to stay, its horizons must be expanded through the intense cross-pollination of insights from scientific and practical fields that are still only rarely brought into sustained contact. Specifically, HUD combines the insights of critical social scientific perspectives – including political science, sociology, and anthropology – with those of the applied insights of architecture and development engineering, and the deep experience of humanitarian practitioners. We do so with the goal of engaging critically yet pragmatically with humanitarian design. This means engaging reflexively with all the problems that currently mark the field – criticising the very existence of humanitarian design – without refusing the crucial pragmatic task of engaging in the here-and-now, despite the dangers that poses.