Designing Their Way

Amy Smith is the Founding Director of MIT D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the founder of the International Development Design Summit, co-founder of the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge, co-founder of Rethink Relief conference, and originator of the Creative Capacity Building Methodology.

MIT D-Lab, founded by Smith in 2002, is a highly regarded education and international development program with 25+ staff, enrollment of ~300 students annually. Smith is the creator of 6 MIT courses focusing on technology design, international development, and humanitarian innovation, an inventor and community organizer committed to poverty alleviation.

Half of the nearly 30 million refugees today are 18 or younger. Most struggle for basic needs, dignity, and education with little opportunity to realize their potential or develop agency and creativity. We want to improve, refine, and disseminate our interactive design training for refugee youth, adapting it for different refugee contexts.  We will embed psychosocial elements into the current training in Greece, incorporating life skills while providing youth the opportunity to develop creativity and gain confidence through new abilities. We will develop a hybrid program with in-person classes and an app-based platform to extend the program’s reach. Finally, we will work to make this program culturally and contextually adaptable, piloting it in our design training with refugee youth in Uganda. We believe this will provide other organizations a new approach to working with refugee youth, unleashing creativity, building psychosocial support and providing agency.

Young refugees, who comprise more than half of the nearly 30 million refugees globally, face huge hurdles in developing their potential and accessing education. In sites as diverse as Uganda and Greece, refugee youth face barriers to education after already having lost time and opportunities to war and conflict. In both sites, youth suffer sexual exploitation and loss of family and social networks. There is a serious lack of programs that address the psychological impact of trauma caused by war, forced migration, witnessing death, or experiencing torture and abuse.  The loss of schooling, opportunities and alternatives to living at the margin exacerbates the risk of psychosocial problems as youth struggle to maintain identity and self confidence. Existing programs geared towards refugee youth may address single aspects, such as vocational training, but they lack a holistic approach that can integrate building confidence, providing agency, restoring self esteem and teaching concrete skills they can apply to their daily lives. Our project aims to address this gap and support refugee youth in several key ways.

Our effective new approach to working with refugee youth incorporates psychosocial support with developing hands-on interactive skills, thus providing them with opportunities for agency and creativity. This project will operate in three stages:

1. The first stage will incorporate psychosocial activities into D-Lab’s hands-on design training program for refugee youth in the Horizon Center in Greece. This will provide life skills in areas ranging from woodworking to tailoring to problem-solving, thereby improving confidence and strengthening resilience. 

2. We then aim to create a hybrid (online + offline) platform for the design program,  developing an app for use in distance learning so that we can expand our reach geographically and also connect with new groups through other organizations. 

3. Finally, we will pilot this program and implement it in our work with refugees in Northern Uganda to study how we can best adapt the design program for refugee youth for use in radically different cultures and contexts.

We believe that this project can significantly address the demeaning lack of opportunity and support that these youth face. In addition, we hope to train new organizations and disseminate this approach in order to reach the wider community.

We work with refugee youth directly in two sites, Greece and Uganda.  There are over 50,000 refugee youth in Greece, the majority of whom have fled violence in Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. A lack of shelters in Athens has forced over a fifth of them onto the streets, putting them at risk of trafficking, exploitation, and substance abuse. D-lab works with these youth through our Faros partnership. Heewon Lee, our team’s curriculum designer, has spent several months in 2019 and 2020 working on-site with the youth and Faros staff, iterating the design program based on continual feedback from both to develop effective pedagogy.

In 2019, D-Lab led two design workshops with refugees in Rhino camp in Northern Uganda collaborating with YSAT, a South Sudanese refugee youth led organization.  Over half of the 200,000 refugees in Rhino camp are youth; they are marginalized at many levels by camp leadership, lack access to education and opportunities, and are vulnerable to sexual and labor exploitation. YSAT is a leading voice highlighting youth priorities.  D-lab, YSAT, and Kulika are cooperating in a new project in 2020 in Rhino and Mvepi camps to establish innovation centers and design training for refugees.

Deep-rooted biases and political conditions exclude the refugee community from most work and education opportunities. In particular, youth who have undergone significant trauma are highly susceptible to being reduced to a mere “refugee” stereotype without adequate opportunities to explore their own identity or demonstrate their creativity and abilities. Our program aims to empower refugee youth with technical and life skills through a design curriculum. We believe this approach will help youth be able to see themselves in innovative and creative roles and improve their sense of self, thereby enabling them to discover, develop, and seize opportunities to better their lives.

In a Humanitarian Innovation workshop in London in November 2016, Amy Smith and Martha Thompson from D-Lab’s Humanitarian Innovation group met a gender specialist working with unaccompanied refugee minors in Greece. Her description of their dire situation including homelessness, sense of abandonment, and sexual exploitation strongly affected the D-Lab team. They reached out to Greek NGOs to see if a CCB design workshop might be a way to support the youth and empower them to develop practical solutions to the problems they faced. After connecting with Faros, D-Lab led a design workshop with 17 boys in August 2017 that had such an immediate impact on the youth that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, agreed to fund Faros and D-Lab to start a standing design program for refugee youth. 

As we developed the work with Faros, we continued to see that it had a strong positive impact on youth who were difficult to reach through other means.  This reinforced our plan to provide design training to refugees in camps in Uganda, as it demonstrated the transformative impact on youth: increasing their ability to believe in themselves and enabling them to improve skills and open ideas for the future.

Our team is passionate about the transformational power of participatory design, particularly in refugee situations. People fleeing conflict lose many things when they cross borders and become refugees: social networks, family, friends, a personal identity, ability to move freely, and access to services and opportunities. A key thing they lose which is often overlooked is agency. Because of the way most humanitarian aid is structured, refugees are provided goods and services but not consulted about what their personal priorities may be. D-Lab has worked for the past few years on piloting ways to build local innovation ecosystems in humanitarian situations. This means bringing refugees into the design process and giving them the skills to frame their own problems and develop solutions. Through this approach, we have discovered that while the innovative products refugees produce through the design process are important, the process of learning design itself is transformative, particularly in the humanitarian context. We want to harness this transformative power for refugee youth and continually help them learn, grow, and process their trauma. Additionally, we want to develop ways of making such an experience accessible to a wider community of refugees.

Since 2017, we have built a strong relationship with local partners in Greece and Uganda focusing on design education for refugee youth. Since then, we have established design centers in both locations equipped with full-time staff who are trained in the D-Lab Creative Capacity Building (CCB) curriculum and teach the local refugee youth on a daily basis. In the humanitarian innovation sector, we are currently the only organization focusing on providing psychosocial support through a design education program and it has been proven to be a transformative experience for many of the youth. As a result, many organizations have been supporting our program and are asking us for advice and support on how to transfer the knowledge to their programs. More broadly, we have pioneered the CCB approach in a variety of contexts and have a deep pool of experience and connections in this field. We believe this enables us to effectively adapt to a refugee youth context and create a meaningful solution.

On 11th March 2020, the Horizon Center was required to close its doors to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Immediately, the Center has adapted its services to continue to provide fundamental components of the program and introduced new initiatives to fight against the pandemic. The classes and activities provided at the Horizon Center are predominantly hands-on and require access to specialized equipment and materials. To accommodate the closure, D-Lab and Faros underwent a massive program redesign. We restructured each activity using a Vlog format to replicate in-person interactivity and appeal to the youth. However, we found that many did not have sufficient data bandwidth to watch the videos consistently. We then modified our curriculum once more to be easily disseminated through GIF files that are much small in size. We paired lessons with downloadable step-by-step guides so youth could access activities without the burden of finding wifi or using mobile data. We have now fully transitioned our program to an online class providing both design activities and psychosocial support so the youth can continue their education. Most recently, we provided each participant with toolkits that enable them to work on skill-based design projects individually.

Amy Smith won the McArthur Prize in 2005 for her work in inventing cheap sustainable solutions to difficult problems encountered by  grassroots communities in the global south. She was the first woman to win the MIT Lemelson prize for turning ideas into inventions and is deeply passionate about designing appropriate and workable solutions for grassroots communities. In her work, she realized that people in the communities had the clearest understanding of their problems and a tremendous capacity for innovation. Because of their poverty and lack of education, their input, experience and knowledge was often overlooked in the efforts of outsiders attempting to solve their problems. Thus she developed a co-design methodology to bring communities into the design process. From 2009-2011, when working in northern Uganda with war displaced communities returning home, the absence of other makers and skilled workers inspired her to teach community members the design process so they could design their own innovative solutions for rebuilding after the conflict. Out of this work, Amy created the interactive, hands-on Creative Capacity Building (CCB) curriculum for use across all educational and literacy levels. CCB revolutionizes the position of users, allowing them to be designers of their own solutions.

Our Humanitarian Innovation team is part of the Innovation Practice at MIT D-Lab (not-for-profit 501(c)(3)), which works globally to develop and advance collaborative design approaches for practical solutions to poverty challenges. MIT D-Lab is re-thinking the role of technology and design in development and has enabled thousands in over 25 countries to address daily challenges of poverty through design, prototyping, production, and social entrepreneurship. In the Humanitarian Innovation group, we integrate participatory design into humanitarian innovation, empowering refugees to identify problems and create their own solutions. We work on areas of curriculum development, monitoring and evaluation, and co-design processes.

While the vast majority of current humanitarian aid is focused on meeting basic needs in a top-down manner, D-Lab is pioneering a grassroots approach of involving the affected population in the solution. Fundamentally, the user is integrated in the design process and their feedback and preferences are a key input for designers. Beyond mere user-centric design, however, D-Lab has strived to further involve the user in the design process. Their curriculum aimed to empower people with little or no formal schooling to design and build simple prototypes of useful items for daily life, from rat traps to solar-powered cell phone chargers. This process, known as Creative Capacity Building (CCB), intends to bring affected individuals to the forefront of actively developing projects, products, programs, and technologies to improve their own daily lives, restore confidence and agency, and drastically alter the way that relief organizations choose to give aid.

In the refugee youth context, D-Lab has found that this form of user-centered and user-led design curriculum serves not only to improve short-term psychosocial outcomes, but also to create a path to self-resilience and long-term restoration of humanity. The following patterns emerged as psychosocial benefits: acquisition of new skills and knowledge; changed self- perspectives; greater confidence and increased agency with problem solving; desire to teach others and share knowledge; development and expansion of relationships; building social capital.

IF (Inputs, Outputs, Activities) we empower refugee youth with design, technical, and life skills training through a hybrid education program.

THEN (Medium-Term Outcomes) the beneficiaries will have a working knowledge of the design process and will have acquired a basic proficiency in woodwork, tailoring, electronics, CAD & 3D printing, computers and more. They will have the ability to work collaboratively in teams, give and receive feedback, and effectively and creatively problem-solve. 

THEN (Long-Term Impact) the beneficiaries will have a foundation from which they can confidently seek and create future opportunities by applying the knowledge gained in the program, despite their circumstances and physical location. Their sense of self-confidence, resilience, and agency will be restored. Ultimately, they will be able to better integrate into their new communities safely and fairly.

Since 2019, over 300 beneficiaries have registered to the Horizon Center Design Program. Each year we expect 240 new students and have already reached 131 beneficiaries in 2020. We are expecting to have 1000-1200 beneficiaries by 2023.  

Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we have temporarily shifted our program to an online classroom format and discovered the potential of operating an online course to reach out to a larger group of potential beneficiaries who can’t participate physically due to distance, culture, living conditions, etc. With the hybrid design program, we predict the program will grow 20% by 2021, and by 2024, we aim to support 2000-2400 beneficiaries (100% growth).

The refugee design program in Uganda with Kulika has a goal of 150 refugees a year for two years beginning in 2020 for a total of 300, the majority of which will be youth. There will be two design training centers, in Rhino and  Mvepi camps. This project will be integrated into the 2020 work, impacting over 100 youth in the design training centers as D-Lab works to adapt the program to the cultural and contextual differences of the camp in Uganda. In the second half of the second year of the project, we will begin testing the adapted hybrid program in Uganda to reach 300 refugee youth. 

 In two years,  we will have a hybrid design program that can be culturally and contextually adapted for use by humanitarian organizations working with refugee youth in a wide range of situations.

Our biggest goal is to provide the refugee youth a design education that embeds psychosocial activities aimed at building life skills which will help them enhance their creativity and develop their agency as a way to recover from trauma and expand their opportunities. With a hybrid design program, we wish to reach a greater number of refugee youth who can learn design through hands-on activities that empower them to innovate and find solutions to problems in their lives. In addition, we want to show local communities that refugee youth can be innovators and creative problem solvers and break through existing stereotypes.

Through this hybrid program, we also want to provide tools and materials to organizations in different cultures and contexts where we can train them as design instructors and create programs that can benefit their target groups. By operating in both Greece and Uganda, we aim to create a generalizable and adaptable program that can be utilized in many other contexts. By year two, we hope to begin testing of the hybrid program in both sites. By year five, we hope to finalize content development and testing. Then, we can scale and disseminate to other refugee situations and share our tools with other organizations.

Our main challenges are the following:

 COVID-19: Unpredictable spread of the virus and constant changes of civil safety measures from the government make it hard to maintain an in-person program. Also, maintaining a safe physical distance while carrying out the design program is challenging.

Changing political conditions: Possible changes in government policies and regulations toward refugees in Greece and Uganda could destabilize the youth living situation further and render consistent program participation challenging.

Financial: We have received grants from many organizations to build the offline program curriculum and establish the innovation centres. Now, we need to raise funds to develop and disseminate the hybrid (online & offline) program to reach our beneficiaries during this pandemic.  

Technical: Not everyone can access the innovation centers due to distance, cultural issues, living conditions, access to wifi or mobile data. Also, the innovation centers are at maximum capacity so we must find alternative ways to support other refugee youth who are in need.   

To address these barriers, we plan to do the following.

COVID-19 and changing political conditions: Create an online education platform accompanied with an app where the beneficiaries can remotely attend classes and engage in design activities. This can help us prevent the spread of the virus while continuing their education and receiving psychosocial support. Such a platform also improves flexibility of the program and accommodates inconsistent attendance at the center, since students can participate remotely.

Financial: We will need to first design and test our hybrid program and clearly demonstrate its impact. With this clarity, we believe we can seek out donors and raise additional funding.

Technical: Creating an online education platform accompanied with an app will allow us to reach a greater number of refugee youth while solving the current capacity issues we are facing at the innovation centers . Also, it will enable us to share this platform and train other organizations to create programs that can reach more refugee youth.

D-Lab works with grassroots organizations and NGOs in Africa, Latin American, Asia and Greece to teach a design curriculum called Creative Capacity Building. Developed at D-Lab, CCB teaches people from a wide range of literacy and formal education backgrounds to innovate and find solutions to problems in their lives. Since 2018, the Humanitarian Innovation team has increasingly focused on adapting CCB to refugee situations in Greece and Uganda. In Greece, D-Lab partners with Faros, a non-profit organization supporting refugee youth. Based on several  design workshops that MIT led for refugee youth in Athens, Faros received funding for a permanent innovation and vocational training center for refugees: the Horizon Center. D-Lab has been working closely with Faros since the Center opened in January 2019, leading the development and adaptation of a design curriculum based on CCB and training the Faros staff as design facilitators.

In Uganda, D-Lab began working with Kulika, a Ugandan NGO, to train farmers in rural communities in the CCB curriculum in 2016. Since 2019, we have collaborated to launch  a design training program and innovation center for South Sudanese refugees in two refugee camps, Rhino and Imvepi, located in Northern Uganda. In this effort, we also collaborate with the Youth Social Advocacy Team, a refugee youth organization led by South Sudanese refugees in Rhino camp in Northern Uganda. They worked with Kulika and D-Lab to convene and organize  two design training workshops in Rhino camp in 2019 and will also be part of the 2020 project.

-Velux Foundation: Grant / Received in 2019 / 2.8 million USD for 5 years

-UNHCR: Grant / Received in 2018 / 28k USD each year

-Tech Stars: Grant/ Received in 2020 / 25k USD for one year

-Western Union Foundation: Grant /25k USD/ each year for two years

-MIT Global Class Room : Grant /17k USD / for two years

-Maltesar: Grant/200k USD /for 18 months

Due to the recent changes of the program we are currently in the process of revising the budget for 2020. We will update and provide the budget upon request. 

We are currently looking for funding to refine, improve and expand the reach of this training for a much greater impact. The Elevate prize  would allow us to redesign our design education curriculum in three aspects, taking us to the next stage. It would give us the means to systematically embed psychosocial supports into the program. We could develop a hybrid program that jointly utilizes (1) in-person design and tools training, (2) online lessons coaching youth through the design process, and (3) offline activities for the youth to practice and design products and services using CAD, code, electronics, tailoring, and more. We believe that such a program could vastly improve accessibility as a hybrid program can better resist political and cultural shocks such as the pandemic and can be easily adapted for different refugee communities from Greece to Uganda to beyond. The opportunity to bring our work in Greece and Uganda together allows us to work on making this program culturally and contextually adaptable.  

In addition to financial help, the cross-sector community of Solve and The Elevate Prize could hopefully aid us in creatively transforming our curriculum style while maintaining efficacy. We would greatly benefit from assistance with evaluation as our team has qualitatively observed remarkable psychosocial and technical progress from the youth. The next step is to quantify and analyze this to continually improve the program.  This would enable us to document and demonstrate the benefits of our program,  empowering us to scale to other refugee communities.

We are seeking funding to assist with the transition as we move forward with integrating deeper psychosocial support into the design curriculum and developing the hybrid program. We want to empower the refugee youth to be able work on design projects outside of the existing centers, which requires initial investments into materials, equipment, and tools. We are also seeking support with talent recruitment, as we would like to recruit individuals with design backgrounds as additional instructors and content developers for the program. 

Lastly, we would greatly benefit from assistance with monitoring and evaluation. Thus far, we’ve been able to demonstrate the beneficiaries’ technical progress and eventual outcomes, but much of the psychosocial growth is observational and anecdotal. We are looking for support for quantification, measurement, and documentation of these results as we have witnessed immense transformations first-hand and want to be able to share this in a common language.

We are still in the process of identifying additional potential partners for this project. Broadly, we are interested in partners working on psychosocial support for refugee youth and international NGOs working on vocational programs for refugee youth.