How can technology, design, and architecture be used to protect individuals in prisons or refugee camps from violence? Starting in September, Anna Leander is co-leading a groundbreaking collaborative project that brings together insights of practitioners, technologists, designers, and social scientists to rethink and co-design the features of humanitarian spaces.
Hosted by the Global Governance Centre, the Future of Humanitarian Design (HUD) is a four-year Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funded project exploring how emerging technologies, processes of aesthetic design, and engineering insights can be combined with knowledge from political science to tackle the crisis facing humanitarianism.
The project is a collaboration between the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne. It also integrates high-level policy practitioners as project partners based at organizations including Médecins sans frontières (Doctors without Borders), Terre des hommes, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, alongside partnerships with research institutions in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.