![]() The process This design guide documents people’s stories and reflections, and frames both challenges and opportunities, barriers and enablers in a human-centered way that is creative, anchored in human connection, and focused on user perspectives and experiences. The design-thinking and co-design methodology was designed to be inclusive and iterative, as the team convened a group of experienced humanitarian practitioners, refugees and other crisis-affected communities alongside people from the private sector, finance, academia and the media as co-designers. The process started with creating a shared understanding of the vision and objective, followed by a process of rapid exploration and innovation, and formulation of the vision of the ‘future humanitarian state’. The below questions summarize the framework for this design inquiry; however, the approach utilized methods of storytelling to illicit personal stories and reflections which then served as the springboard for ideas about alternative humanitarian futures. Using individual responses from consultations, the design team develop The Vision The Design Guide envisions a framework in which future responses are based on a clear understanding of the needs of crisis-affected people and proposes ideas for how humanitarian actors might do better to meet them. Four ideas are prototyped:
Each also describes the ‘response functions’ of the international system within those prototypes. ![]()
Overall, this design process highlights that a behavioral shift is also needed to transform existing systems/ structures. This requires actors to: · Think differently: The new humanitarian worldview requires actors to practice what they preach in terms of transparency and accountability – even when politically or temporally inconvenient. · Speaking differently: New futures embrace an alternative ‘humanitarian lexicon’ that suggests that crisis-affected people play an active (rather than passive) role in their recovery, and that language used is suited to the audience to enable participation from a wider group of actors · Doing Differently: Furthermore, the new approach requires more day-to-day rituals and habits that incentivize proactive trust-building, reward genuine collaboration, and prescribe complementarity to avoid parallel structures. For the full report, please see here. |
Tool: A Design Experiment: Imagining Alternative Humanitarian Action
Author:
Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Humanitarian Policy Group
Publication Date:
January 2018