Open AccessDesigning for a pandemic: towards recovery and resilience
Author(s) -
Louise Mullagh,
Rachel Cooper,
Lisa Thomas,
Justin Sacks,
Peter Jones,
Naomi Jacobs
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
strategic design research journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 3
ISSN - 1984-2988
DOI - 10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.14
Subject(s) - realm , pandemic , resilience (materials science) , covid-19 , humanity , psychological intervention , psychological resilience , work (physics) , political science , sociology , engineering ethics , engineering , psychology , social psychology , biology , medicine , mechanical engineering , physics , disease , pathology , virology , psychiatry , outbreak , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law , thermodynamics
Design is recognized as a discipline that is ideally placed to work across boundaries to tackle wicked problems and help cope with uncertainty. As humanity continues to become more interconnected it is thought that we are becoming more exposed to viruses such as COVID-19. Therefore, the current pandemic offers us opportunities to re-think and re-design many of our practices to ensure we are resilient in future similar crises . Through the creation and analysis of a database that captures design interventions that have emerged during the pandemic, the paper considers the role design can play in collectively recovering from the current pandemic and building resilience for the future. Whilst the findings represent the beginning of this process, (from late March until June 2020) we find that design has been deployed in a wide range of ways and on all scales, from the personal, communal, organizational, national and international. However, as we live through and emerge from the pandemic we should reflect, within the realm of design research and beyond, on how we might harness design to enable recovery and build resilience for the future.