From managing extreme events to pandemics, states and international organisations have increasingly turned to design to tackle what they conceive as increasingly complex and unpredictable crises. As a result, design thinking precepts and the design of innovative technologies have been hailed as key ingredients in the pursuit of efficient, human-centred and sustainable responses that can adapt to local conditions and social relations. However, the turn to innovation in aid has been condemned for its relentless love for novelty, techno-utopianism and triumphant narrative of progress, which produce a disconnect between the enthusiasms of innovators and the lives of the people they are meant to assist (Scott-Smith 2016). More widely, scholars have critiqued the rising celebration of risk as an opportunity for enterprise and reinvention, the burden of which has been placed on the shoulders of vulnerable populations. Examining how design interfaced with transnational disaster responses between 1970 and the 1980s, the talk will nevertheless examine how design as a plural form of intervention has historically encompassed many crisis imaginaries and practices. The talk will moreover advance the central role of historical enquiry at a time when innovation has repeatedly been condemned for remaining inherently apolitical and ahistorical, thereby failing to fundamentally transform worldviews and practices.
Speaker
Dr. Tania Messell is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Global Governance Centre. Her research interests cover global, international and transnational histories of design, the past and current role of innovation and design in humanitarian aid and international development, and the rise of infrastructures of resilience. Author of several peer-reviewed publications, she is also the co-editor of International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values published by Bloomsbury (2022).
Discussant
Franca Kappes, doctoral student, International Relations and Political Science Department, Geneva Graduate Institute
Chair
James White, PhD candidate in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and Junior Visiting Fellow at the Global Governance Centre.
***A Light lunch for attendees will be served in the hall petale 2, Maison de la Paix from 12pm***