Interdisciplinary Co-Design & Research for Humanitarian Design: Promise of Inclusion or Exclusion?

The three-year interdisciplinary research initiative, The Future of Humanitarian Design (HUD) investigates whether co-design-engaging engineers, architects, social scientists, humanitarians, and affected communities-can produce tangible technological innovations for the humanitarian sector. With fieldwork conducted in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the project centered on two complex themes: continuity of care for migrants in the Darién Gap (Colombia) and mental health in detention spaces (DRC). Employing a humancentered design approach, the research team facilitated two codesign workshops aimed at identifying relevant engineering design challenges. Early findings reveal significant tensions between disciplinary approaches, and the slow, often nonlinear path toward defining actionable design problems. This research reflects on the challenges of interdisciplinary humanitarian design work and considers the conditions under which such an approach may be genuinely inclusive-or inadvertently exclusionary.