Design for relief, recovery, and rebuilding
Are you interested in finding out how participatory innovation can improve the situation of people impacted by conflict?
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, predicts that by the end of 2025 there will be 139 million people forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, or persecution. Available resources are heavily strained, and organizations urgently need innovative solutions to provide basic needs to this population.
MIT D-Lab takes a capacity-building approach to this challenge, engaging refugees and displaced people in creating solutions to the problems they face and developing opportunities for self-reliance. D-lab’s Humanitarian Innovation class focuses on building students’ skills to work with conflict-impacted populations in the area of humanitarian innovation, providing an opportunity to travel over spring break to participate in a co-creation workshop with refugees in the Rhino and Imvepi settlements in northern Uganda.
Specifically, the class provides a solid grounding in:
- The history of humanitarianism and the overall structure, key challenges, and the current situation in the humanitarian sector.
- The evolution of humanitarian innovation and approaches to it that bring the experience, skills, and talent of refugees and displaced people into the innovation process.
- D-Lab’s design methodology as a pathway for inclusive humanitarian innovation
- Skills building in participatory methods for innovation with a focus on co-creation
To help students understand the range of humanitarian challenges in the world today, the class will focus on situations of protracted displacement and response from conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Myanmar.
During spring break, interested students will be able to travel to Uganda with the instructors and apply their participatory design skills in a co-creation workshop with refugees, host community members and NGOs around specific humanitarian innovation projects.
The class is open to both undergraduate and graduate students (those who are taking the graduate version must complete an additional assignment).
The class meets at from 1pm-3pm on Mondays and Wednesdays in MIT Room N51-305 and is taught by D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith and Humanitarian Specialist Martha Thompson who lead the MIT D-Lab Humanitarian Innovation program.