Graduation project Joseph Kesisoglou: Foster Resilience
ongoing
Graduation project for the Netherlands Red Cross.
Climate change poses great challenges for many communities around the world.The rise of extreme weather conditions, such as heatwaves, finds urban habitats unprepared in the face of persisting urban heatwaves.
A partnership between the Netherlands Red Cross and Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering was formed with the aim of advancing knowledge and creating novel approaches for adaptation and resilience to urban heatwaves.
Taking a long-term and systemic view of the city as a space where a multitude of forces are at play, research was focused on the misalignment between top-down policy intent and the unintended consequences on urban communities. Questioning the centralised decision-making processes, led to the opportunity to explore how citizens can affect local decisions, through daily acts of care, towards the city and their neighbours.
In this vision-driven design, the Red Cross was positioned as a stakeholder who can enable citizens to take initiatives, by providing them with the right tools.
The concept of a networking platform which helps citizens address problems in their communities through collaboration with the each other and the local council was developed. The concept aimed at addressing how people relate within a community, in order to foster resilience and adaptation, through actively participating in, and caring for the commons. The platform can be better understood as the soil on which relationships can grow.
A prototype of the platform was performed in the city of Delft during the summer of 2020, to explore how citizens received and used the low-fidelity mobile application.
A detailed concept design of the mobile application is being developed for the Netherlands Red Cross.
The graduation project was selected to take part in the Design United event “Up Close and Personal” during the Dutch Design Week 2020.