Niloufar Gharavi
Refugees desgin students unemployment humanitarian design schools Figures from the UNHCR (2015), revealed that in the first six months of 2015, 137,000 refugees and migrants attempted to enter the EU, a rise of %83 on the same period in 2014. As the UNHCR, notes this has placed enormous pressure on the European country’s infrastructure and made it increasingly difficult for refugees to access, work, shelter and education. On the other hand, the problem of refugees’ unemployment puts lots of pressure on the host countries to provide their everyday needs, despite them being capable of doing it themselves. Consequently, finding solutions to activate their wasting capacities and potentials is a demanding field to look into. Therefore, this project aims to explore how design qualities and approaches could be applied to the specific context of refugee camps and how it could improve the everyday life of the facilities’ inhabitants. In particular, it intends to investigate how collaborative making and handcraft activities could be used as a way to bring together diverse actors, especially the refugees and design students, within camps and encourage them put into play their personal abilities in designing and building products for the camps. As a collaboration among humanitarians and design schools, project is formed to benefit from the inclusive perspectives and tools of co-design and system oriented design in mapping and structuring the complex data in this field and designing series of workshops upon. In addition, the borrowed approaches from the in-transit studio which already demonstrates the values of such combinations, support the project with extended knowledge and understanding of the field.