Crowdsolving for professionals

Architects, engineers and other professionals must take immediate action in the development of the global emergency response to the natural or man-made disasters that are increasingly occurring in different part of the world. In times of crisis, the whole world should act to help war refugees and environmental migrants with the recovery efforts. Designers have the opportunity to propose solutions that can minimize the suffering and prevent the deaths of thousands of people.

Wars have devastating effects on people’s lives. By designing refugee camps, we will provide an alternative for the people who lost their homes and had to escape, leaving everything behind. The design of a refugee camp must minimize the already made psychological damage to the refugees by creating a welcoming environment and a new temporary home.

In current times, natural disasters are happening more often due to climate change. We can’t do much to stop them, but as architects and engineers, we can offer temporary solutions by designing transitional shelters for the recovery period. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2012 hurricane Sandy in the USA, the 2013 typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, are just some of the examples of the devastation effect of natural disasters. We need to take action.

The goal of this online course is to generate designs for emergency shelters for the victims of wars and natural disasters. The participants in this course will design affordable and easy to build shelters, which could be implemented by OCHA, UNHCR, WBG, and other international organisations. We will engage with a team of architects, planners, engineers, and social workers from all over the world. After the course, the projects and instructions will be placed on an open source platform, so anyone can download and use them.