The humanitarian village, a response to small-medium sized disaster

The growing number of disasters occurred for the past decades has been increasing the number of studies on disaster subject. The topics are varies ranging from theory, mitigation and management, educations, as well as design and planning for post-disaster context. The demand for products for emergency response has also increased. Not limited to food, medicines, blankets and cloths that must be made available immediately following any catastrophic event, but survivors also need shelters. “The great mass of survivors must get a roof over their head, and quickly above all”. Considering the important of providing shelters for survivors, the Centre for Design Innovation (CDI) of Swinburne University of Technology is embarking a project called ‘Humanitarian village (Shelter+) Project (sanctuary from distress, community care). This project focused on community-led design for better temporary pop up shelter villages for people escaping highly distressing scenarios, particularly smaller to medium sized events such as flood and bushfires. This project aims to bridge the gap between donor agencies with manufacture companies on how to design and produce the emergency and temporary shelters in the humanitarian context. It will be focused on small to medium disasters. It will be done through series and continuous collaboration researches in order to produce ‘prototype’ model design Shelter+ that can be development into several variants designs depend on the needed or contexts (type of disaster, location, culture, etc.). As a leading university who has strong collaboration with industry sector, CDI will also promote the Shelter+ models not only for the academic or humanitarian fields through related International Conferences but also promoting to manufacturing companies for the possibility of production.