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Design to Live: Everyday Inventions from a Refugee Camp
The power of design to create a life worth living even in a refugee designs, inventions, and artworks from the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan.
This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions--forced displacement, trauma, and struggle--design can help create a life worth living. Design to Live documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations--including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick--refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp.
Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, Design to Live, reflects two perspectives on the people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp--and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University.
Copublication with Future Heritage Lab, MIT
This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions--forced displacement, trauma, and struggle--design can help create a life worth living. Design to Live documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations--including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick--refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp.
Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, Design to Live, reflects two perspectives on the people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp--and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University.
Copublication with Future Heritage Lab, MIT
- GenresDesign
344 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 2021
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April 27, 2022
1. This book is beautifully designed and does deliver a story. It can be read in either direction, and the successful delivery of information in both Arabic (read right to left) and English (read left to right) is impressive. I would note that the density of information is quite low as a result of this pursuit -- there are maybe ~40 pages of actual text in this book.
2. The authors treat the inventors and interviewees in the camp with the utmost respect, and the interviews contain some really beautiful and powerful prose about the importance of creating a life worth living and not relegating persons in refugee camps to transient lives of impermanence. I really appreciated that the authors stayed far away from savior complexes.
3. If you are looking for hardcore inventions or engineering materials, this is not the book for you. The subject emphasis, language, and interviews is strongly influenced by the field of design and uses the accompanying flowery prose. That form of communication is effective in delivering the authors' message, but this is not an engineering textbook.
4. As a broader commentary on the humanitarian sector, this book offers a reminder that intended beneficiaries of support know their needs better than anyone who might want to intervene. Understanding their priorities is paramount -- they may be culturally driven, rather than strictly utilitarian uses of resources, such as adding additional areas for receiving guests so that women can remain veiled in their homes while company is visiting.
5. Overall, the book is quite good at capturing some of the ways that refugees in the Azraq camp in Jordan are making their lives worth living. I will say that it in part felt like MIT had a grant to offer humanitarian assistance in collaboration with a few other universities, then that they got to the camps and were stymied by bureaucratic regulations and the fact that the refugees seemed to be faring quite well for themselves. This book feels like the product of the culturally sensitive design class that Professor Aksamija was teaching that may have been necessary in part to justify funding received for the project.
2. The authors treat the inventors and interviewees in the camp with the utmost respect, and the interviews contain some really beautiful and powerful prose about the importance of creating a life worth living and not relegating persons in refugee camps to transient lives of impermanence. I really appreciated that the authors stayed far away from savior complexes.
3. If you are looking for hardcore inventions or engineering materials, this is not the book for you. The subject emphasis, language, and interviews is strongly influenced by the field of design and uses the accompanying flowery prose. That form of communication is effective in delivering the authors' message, but this is not an engineering textbook.
4. As a broader commentary on the humanitarian sector, this book offers a reminder that intended beneficiaries of support know their needs better than anyone who might want to intervene. Understanding their priorities is paramount -- they may be culturally driven, rather than strictly utilitarian uses of resources, such as adding additional areas for receiving guests so that women can remain veiled in their homes while company is visiting.
5. Overall, the book is quite good at capturing some of the ways that refugees in the Azraq camp in Jordan are making their lives worth living. I will say that it in part felt like MIT had a grant to offer humanitarian assistance in collaboration with a few other universities, then that they got to the camps and were stymied by bureaucratic regulations and the fact that the refugees seemed to be faring quite well for themselves. This book feels like the product of the culturally sensitive design class that Professor Aksamija was teaching that may have been necessary in part to justify funding received for the project.
Displaying 1 of 1 review