HUD explores humanitarian design dilemmas in three core humanitarian focal points, working towards co-designing critical-pragmatic interventions in each space.
Prisons & detention
How do we reduce violence in detention? Within armed conflict? Amidst humanitarian crisis? In authoritarian states? What role can architecture and technology play to reduce violence ? Can the global prison crisis be designed against? Can a world without violence in detention be imagined?
Camps
Can shelters for refugees, IDPs, and others be more than emergency dwellings? Can they become spaces of protection, vitality, and community? Why has architecture failed to achieve this previously?
Care
Why can humanitarian care be experienced as exclusive, skewed and secluded even when it is not provided by privileged international humanitarians living in protected ‘compounds’? Can design make humanitarian care less alienated from its beneficiaries? Are there new aesthetic imaginaries that can transcend North-South inequalities in the provision of humanitarian care? Can a radically reconfigured approach to design prioritize a ‘Continuity of Care’ sustainable across contexts? Can design help overcome the separation between international humanitarians and the local realities they intervene in?
All Projects
1.
Co-designing mental health in detention
2.
Humanitarian Waiting-Scapes
3.
Visualizing Hope in Humanitarianism
4.
Counter-Cartographies of Prison Space
5.
The Congo is a Prison: Lived experiences of detention
6.
Sousveillance in Detention