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Designing Development: Humanitarian Design in the Financial Inclusion Assemblage
Author(s) -
Schwittay Anke
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12049
Subject(s) - cognitive reframing , financial inclusion , inclusion (mineral) , financial services , work (physics) , business , engineering ethics , engineering , sociology , finance , psychology , social science , mechanical engineering , social psychology
This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.