Research in crisis: new analytical tools for the humanitarian architect

Abstract

In the preface to Design Like you Give a Damn, the much-publicized catalogue of humanitarian design edited by Architecture for Humanity, author Kate Stohr charts “100 years of humanitarian design”, starting with the government-sponsored sheds built after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and concluding with the dozens of humanitarian projects featured in the volume itself. In the process, Stohr highlights a troubling trend. From the well-documented failures of early modernist housing to the minimal range of current work by Rural Studios and others, Stohr’s survey of over 100 years humanitarian design contains few, if any, projects that have successfully empowered, invigorated, or unified communities in the long-term. Although designers are quite divided as to the reasons for this checkered history, recent work within the field of development communication might suggest a cause. Historically, the practices of development communication, like those of humanitarian design, have been based upon a diffusion model of practice. In this model, the chief purpose of a development campaign is to provide information that will persuade individuals to change their behavior for the good of many. For myriad reasons, this model failed to work. In response, communication experts developed the participatory model, a practice that trades the top-down processes of information transfer for techniques that promote a continual exchange of information between the players in the project. In the participatory model, the practitioner works with community members to continually reassess their needs and collaboratively design methods to address them. This paper will use the participatory models of development communication to evaluate current practices of the humanitarian designer. As a framework, this writing will accept two methods of assessment: the work of Dr. Jacobson, who has adapted the principles of Jurgen Habermas to offer a new model of evaluation for participatory projects and the post-occupancy evaluation model commonly deployed by architects. From this evaluation, this writing will propose several techniques of pre- and post-occupancy research and evaluation for the humanitarian architect.