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conference paper

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

Howell, Rachel  
October 22, 2025
2025 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
2025 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)

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.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/ghtc66843.2025.11266773
Author(s)
Howell, Rachel  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-10-22

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
2025 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
DOI of the book
https://doi.org/10.1109/GHTC66843.2025
ISBN of the book

979-8-3315-9502-9

Start page

205

End page

206

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ESSTECH-GE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
2025 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)

GHTC 2025

Golden, USA

2025-10-22 - 2025-10-25

Available on Infoscience
December 5, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/256756
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