Designing with Internally Displaced Population

Project Highlights
I collaborated with multiple academics from Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Missouri and University of Toronto for this project. Our ongoing initiative has been designed to understand, and create awareness of the challenges faced by the Internally Displaced Populations (IDPs) in Bangladesh through ethnography and storytelling. Our work reveals that there are several social, cultural, and political factors associated with the sufferings of the IDPs that are often unaddressed in the mainstream discourse around the crisis of forced migration. We intend to provoke discussions around the potential ICT design or policy based interventions to approach these challenges of IDPs. We also wanted to explore how solidarity and sense of justice has been playing a crucial role to create social bond for a community who are constantly threatened to leave their houses by the powerful entities of the state.
Find our project website here.

As part of this project, I studied the lack of social inclusion as one of the major problems of IDPs through the eyes of an environmental engineer. My research framework involved building up a model to improve accessibility to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and billing services by combining engineering and technological solutions along with community involvement and a substantial shift in public policy as well as justification of the model by extensive field research in Shattola slum.
The findings of the research also reflected the migration trend and pattern in Bangladesh for the climatic events it often faces and tries to reveal the real time scenario of the climate change effects in Bangladesh from an environmental engineering perspective that is often under addressed in the mainstream discourse around the crisis of Global Climate Change. The discussion related with the accessibility to clean water and sanitation re-conceptualize the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 for these victims. This research intends to provoke discussions around the inclusive potential design or policy based interventions to approach these challenges.

Water Resilience.mp4

OutcomesUndergraduate Thesis: Abdullah Hasan Safir. 2018. Social Inclusion of Internally displaced people through improved accessibility to WASH facilities. (A Case study on the success of WASH projects in Shattola Slum).Workshop Paper:Abdullah Hasan Safir, Faheem Hussain, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, “HCI and Forced Mobility: Revisiting SDGs for the IDPs in Bangladesh”, CHI 2017 Symposium on HCI across Borders, Denver, Colorado, 2017ACM Interactions Magazine Article : Abdullah Hasan Safir, Nusrat Jahan Mim, S M Taiabul Haque, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, “Designing with the Internally Displaced Slum Dwellers in Bangladesh”, Marked as ready and assigned to the Mar/Apr, 2021 issue