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:
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.
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.
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.
- Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind
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.
- Other, including part of a larger organization (please explain below)
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.
Humanitarian Innovation Program Coordinator