Design for relief, recovery, and rebuilding
Note: Next offered Fall 2026.
Are you interested in finding out how participatory innovation can improve the situation of people affected by conflict?
In 2025, there were 117.5 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-affected populations in the area of humanitarian innovation, providing opportunities to travel (when safety permits) to participate in co-creation activities with refugees.
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
- Skill-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.
The class is open to both undergraduate and graduate students (those who are taking the graduate version must complete an additional assignment).
The class is taught by D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith and Humanitarian Innovation Specialist Martha Thompson, who lead the MIT D-Lab Humanitarian Innovation program.