Humanitarian aid may look like a standardised emergency kit, a shelter, or a water filter. However, it may also be a collection of supplies assembled by a local pharmacist, a queue at a distribution point or the time people spend waiting for assistance.
The new exhibition Humanitarian, by Design? Le design au cœur de l’humanitaire explores these different forms of aid and the design choices behind them. Now open at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, it brings together nearly 200 objects and photographs, alongside films, audio, textiles, poetry, interactive installations, and video games.
From Humanitarian Kits to Local Solutions
Humanitarian kits provide one of the exhibition’s main starting points. The kits on display show the ethical and political implications of how kits make bodies in humanitarian contexts. The exhibit draws on research by the Geneva Graduate Institute team – Lucas Perez Florentino, Anna Leander, Silke Oldenburg, and Nora Doukkali. An ARP project and a student project developed in the Arts of Making the Social Sciences course (spring 2026) also feature in the exhibition.
The artefacts exhibited include food packages, first-aid supplies, blankets, water filters and much more. These objects tell stories of suppliers designing and marketing kits, of people reassembling, contesting, and reimagining them, and of people who receive them. Standardised institutional kits, placed alongside those assembled by locals, highlight the hierarchies, diversity, budget pressures, creativity and expertise through which kits make bodies. Who is better placed to understand the needs of migrants crossing the Darién Gap than a local pharmacist? Is a kit inherently useful for its contents or for the recognition it provides to displaced women and former FARC combatants in Colombia?
The kit exhibit unpacks these questions through the objects themselves, through podcasts, through films, and through a textile installation developed in a collaboration between Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla, Colombia) and Anna Leander.
Designing Spaces and Waiting
Research by Geneva Graduate Institute doctoral researcher Nora Doukkali examines waiting in humanitarian settings. Photographs and poetry produced through work at Nakivale Refugee Settlement explore how people experience the time spent waiting for water, transport, information and other forms of assistance.
Everyday objects can become part of these systems. A jerrycan, for example, may be used to hold someone’s place in a queue. Barriers determine where people can stand and move, sometimes increasing their vulnerability in unstable or violent settings.
Beyond the object
Multimedia works extend these questions beyond physical objects. A video game places the player in the position of a pregnant woman crossing the Darién and requires decisions under time pressure. Films, podcasts, participatory photography and textile installations examine migration, identity and the ways humanitarian crises are represented.
Together, these works take both the objects and the visitor beyond the seemingly self-contained world of humanitarian kits and into the contexts in which aid is designed, distributed and experienced. They place us within journeys, queues and moments of decision, showing that humanitarian aid cannot be understood separately from the people, places and systems surrounding it.
The exhibition was developed through a collaboration between the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, the Geneva Graduate Institute, HEAD – Genève, the University of Copenhagen and the EPFL EssentialTech Centre. The Institute contributes through the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded Future of Humanitarian Design research project, co-led at the Institute by Professor Anna Leander.
Humanitarian, by Design? Le design au cœur de l’humanitaire is on view at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum from 8 October 2026 to 29 August 2027.