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Exploring the politics and futures of humanitarian design…
1 // HUMANITARIAN
How do we think humanitarianism today? This question is fraught. Since the late 1980s, the scope and intensity of humanitarian action has radically expanded. At the same time, this explosion in activity saw humanitarianism become increasingly politicized, professionalized, commercialized, and securitized. Despite the – very many – concerns expressed over these developments, their controversy was dulled by the hegemonic geopolitical era in which they emerged. Indeed, “humanitarianism can only be understood in relationship to the world order that constitutes it.”1 The transformation of humanitarianism from its roots in minimalist understandings of providing neutral, impartial, and independent relief towards its increasing framing through a rights-based order, a humanitarian-development nexus, and political conditionality was underwritten by the dominance of the United States and its allies.
Today – however – such world order is in flux.
Geopolitically, fragmentation has degraded trust in the humanitarian system, as it is politicized by actors with divergent political interests. Equally, growing militarism and inter-state competition has reduced funding for humanitarian missions.
Technically, emerging technologies have deepened the complexity of world order, introducing novel dangers that can heighten the vulnerability of already marginalized populations globally.
Geologically, climate change has, on the one hand, accelerated the impact of natural humanitarian disasters and, on the other hand, fed into geopolitical divisions over the state of world order.
Economically, growing inequality and oligarchical trends have increased vulnerability across the world, while also risking the commercialization of humanitarian politics, reducing its activities to market logics.
Against this backdrop, it becomes hard to define either the present or future of humanitarianism.
Instead, some go as far as saying that we inhabit a ‘post-humanitarian’ era.2
DESIGN // 2
Under these conditions, where has humanitarianism turned?
To bricks. Mortar. Silicon. Timber. Coltan. Aluminum. Steel. Drafting paper. Ink.
Ones and zeros, algorithmically read. Grids cutting space into fragments. Pencils striating paper. Data centers humming. Cement mixers mixing. Hammers hammering. Apps updating. Screens flickering…
Faced with its current malaise, humanitarianism has become especially enamoured with material, aesthetic, and other tools or practices.
With design.
Humanitarian design.
The use of design, engineering, and architectural techniques has a long history in relief efforts.3 Early minimalist conceptions of humanitarianism mixed legalism with technical, infrastructural, and applied scientific know-how. To get aid where it needed to go, technocrats, engineers, and the like worked collectively. But since the collapse of humanitarianism as a singular thing, within a singular world system, humanitarian design has grown ever-more prominent.
Why?
Technology, architecture, materiality: their seductive qualities for humanitarianism are straightforward. These objects are often perceived as amenable to rationalization and, so, as neutral vectors for an independent and impartial mode of depoliticizing and so, perhaps, re-legitimizing humanitarianism. In this, humanitarian design sometimes seems to be a panacea for humanitarianism’s problems.
But is humanitarian design a false idol? Critiques of seeing design, technology, architecture, and so forth as neutral vectors for improving the human condition are just as longstanding as critiques of humanitarianism themselves. In its techno-self-transformation, humanitarian design risks reducing human beings, politics, and society to numbers in a spreadsheet, pixels on a satellite image, strokes of paint in an artwork, or as faceless bodies for whom concrete structures are built.
If, though, both humanitarianism and design are at an impasse, can alternative routes be imagined for them?
Can we experiment with humanitarian design differently?
3 // EXPERIMENTS
Designing for humanitarianism is no panacea. But, just as every aspect of politics or sociality, it also cannot be escaped. The world is materially, technologically, and architecturally mediated. The question at the centre of the Future of Humanitarian Design is therefore simple: how do we experiment with the design of humanitarian design itself? Can we imagine a different humanitarian design that escapes techno-fetishism, economic rationalities, and the further alienation of beneficiaries from humanitarian agencies and actors? To do so, 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 (see illustration below), and the deep experience of leading humanitarian practitioners (see the HUD team). 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. As such, HUD focuses its activities concretely in exploring three spaces of humanitarian design.
IN SPACES OF VIOLENCE // 4
HUD’s experiments in humanitarian design focus on violence prevention in global contexts. Specifically, we seek to explore the potential of transdisciplinary and transvocational research in reducing instances of political, social, or other violence in three settings: 1) prisons or detention facilities, 2) refugee camps or spaces of displacement, and 3) aid compounds inhabited by humanitarians. Each of these spaces faces specific problems that increase the frequency of violence of different kinds, including due to their material, technological, and architectural construction. HUD’s transdisciplinary team works with actors on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia, alongside core humanitarian practitioners to experiment with critical-pragmatic interventions into these spaces. You can find information on each of these experiments in the documents linked below.
Footnotes
- Barnett, M. (2005). Humanitarianism transformed. Perspectives on politics, 3(4): 733.
- Duffield, M. (2018). Post-humanitarianism: Governing precarity in the digital world. John Wiley & Sons.
- Architecture for Humanity. (2006). Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. Metropolis Books.
