While she spends this week in Calais volunteering at ‘Le Jungle’ refugee centre, design critic Alice Rawsthorn (The International New York Times) publishes a series of posts ‘Design and the Refugee Crisis’ on Instagram, devoted to design’s response to the refugee crises.
On Instagram Rawsthorn highlights both recent and older design solutions for migration issues, starting with the data visualization project ‘Exit’ by American artists and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with architect-artist Laura Kurgan and statistician-artist Mark Hansen, until last January on show in Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Based on a prompt set out by French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, this experimental work is composed of a series of immersive animated maps generated by data that investigate human migrations today and their leading causes, including the impacts of climate change.
Jean Prouvé
From earlier times Rawsthorn recalls the prefabricated, easy to build homes French architect and designer Jean Prouvé designed to easy the needs of thousands of families that had lost their homes in World War II bomb raids. A recent video shows the ease with which the homes could be set up.
And today’s post highlights Migrationlab, founded in 2014 in The Hague by Romanian Laura Pana to create opportunities for refugees and migrants to meet local people from their new cities.