The Future of Humanitarian Design (HUD)

Achieving this cannot be an abstract undertaking. It requires – instead – a practical and situated anchoring in humanitarian practice. The second main goal of HUD is thus to pilot its MAPS approach through the co-design and (technical) prototyping of three material-aesthetic interventions targeted at three spaces of humanitarian action – prisons, (refugee) camps, and (aid) compounds – and three common forms of violence that occur in each space (violence-in-detention, gender-based violence, and violence against aid workers). Specifically, we focus on the place of 1) ‘sousveillance’ algorithms to disrupt violence in detention, 2) lighting technologies to disrupt gender-based violence, and 3) architectural re designs of aid compounds to reduce the risk of violence against humanitarians. These interventions will be developed through a novel methodology elaborated across HUD’s
research. Critically, that methodology privileges extended periods of co-design with key local, international, and other stakeholders.

The MAPS approach and its methodology are designed to have applicability beyond the humanitarian dilemmas HUD addresses. Indeed, we see their development as integral to further conceptual development and extended knowledge production. HUD’s scientific ethos is founded on the contention that ‘making is thinking’ and that the academic disciplines and professional practices it draws upon will expand the scope of both their capacity to engage with the world on practical terms and to analyze and understand its dynamics through acts of co-design. HUD’s third main goal is thus to explore how applied work of this kind can generate a deeper and more sustainable understanding of humanitarian crisis and action and therefore become better at working towards alternative, less violent and more open future visions for world politics: our ultimate concern is with the future of humanitarian design.

HUD adopts a transdisciplinary ethos. It synthesizes insights from across the social sciences that explore global problems with those of development engineering, architecture, design theory, and humanitarian practice. This is reflected in HUD’s core team which combines social scientists, designers, and development engineers based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, the haute école d'art et de design, Genève (HEAD), the University of Copenhagen, the école polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Equally, HUD is a ‘trans-vocational’ project. Its research activities draw on the expertise – for example – of leading humanitarian practitioners based at organizations such as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Terre des hommes, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). It also includes two research partnerships with two leading institutions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia.

This team will work collaboratively across HUD, connecting and cross-pollinating the insights of each involved field and discipline conceptually, methodologically, and practically. A further main research goal underlying HUD rests on this process. We aim to take HUD as an experiment in and of itself for exploring the challenges and potential promises of deeper transvocational collaborations of this kind. In doing so, HUD will generate a series of reflexive lessons learnt and best practices that will assist others in developing similarly transvocational enterprises, something that scientists, practitioners, and wider society all agree is urgently required at this moment.

HUD is funded by a 3.2 million EUR Swiss National Science Foundation Grant. It comprises an international team from across Denmark, Switzerland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, and beyond. HUD is led by its Principal Investigators – Jonathan Luke Austin, Anna Leander, and Javier Contreras Fernandez. Over its course, the project will recruit a team of three doctoral and three postdoctoral researchers, as well as research coordinators. It also draws on a core project partnership at the école polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne’s EssentialTech lab.