Clouds’R’us
Design for
climate refugee, Dialogue, Displacement, systems thinking
Year
2019-2020
Climate-related migration/displacement is one of the greatest challenges of our time. While there is a general consensus that global warming impacts us all, the role it will play in the future of migration is often de-emphasized.
Climate change unequally impacts developing nations and vulnerable communities.
CURRENT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE FAILS THE CLIMATE REFUGEES.
National organizations are information deficit with an under-representation of local communities and knowledge. Therefore, they manufacture policies that either ignore or disrupt the vulnerable. The resultant migration increases stress on urban environments.
This design intervention gives a platform for dialogue for vulnerable communities to share their lived experiences & local knowledge. We need peoples’ participation in global governance and this intervention aims to bridge these opposing scales.
This platform creates and builds knowledge by the ‘locals’ for the ‘officials’. Across the world we experience clouds; and thus are a shared metaphor for migration, climate and knowledge networks.
INSIGHT
What was the most difficult part of this project?
The topic of climate refugees or climate change induced migration is vast. The most difficult part of this project was the framing of the problem before jumping into any design solutions. The discovery phase entailed a lot of secondary research to understand the plethora of existing work and identifying a gap or a need for intervention.
Do you think this project can be scaled up?
Being a classroom project the project was devoved of any particular geographic or political context. The way to scale this project (as discussed in the portfolio) will be to situate it in a specific context and replicate it in other parts of the world.
What was your biggest takeaway learning from this project?
The biggest learning from this project was that design needs to think in multiple scales and must have the ability to connect those scales. In the case of CloudsRus, the knowledge gap and subsequent communication gap between policy makers and vulnerable communities was huge. Design’s role was to device ways to bridge this gap and advocate for inclusion.
Concentric diagram showing decreasing involvement in decision and policy making from central ring to outward rings 
Cloud as a metaphor to communicate and share knowledge of displacement 
CloudRus – a channel that connects mmutliple scales 
Prototyping the CloudsRus recording device for users
