In 2017, the challenge revovled around the idea of designing a form of social entrepreneurship that would empower those who suffer from the global refugee crisis.
Refugee empathy maps were first created to better understand who the project aims to help. Secondary research was used to highlight how refugees might experience life after having fleeing their homes.
Empathy mapping would direct us to exploring the following main bodies of interest which revolved around temporary settlements, open-ended waiting, mental health, and refugee identity formation. This would lead us to uncover underlying themes of how refugees might experience and use time during periods of displacement.
To help us explore and visualize how refugees might experience time a series of systems map were created. A temporal map helps compare the time refugees spent in camps in relation to the administration process they went through as each journey is different.
Insight: No two refugee case file is processed in the same amount of time.
A spatial map helped us better understand changes in the environment in the journey each refugee case study researched.
Insight: No journey leading up to the arrival of a refugee camp is ever the same.
The literature review and systems mapping of how refugees might experience and use time during a period of displacement highlighted the following entry points our design research could intervene in.
To help narrow down which entry points we would focus on, we mapped out the day in the life of each refugee story we studied and assigned entry points to day in the life events. Entry point categories that came up the most often in stories were used to help further frame our research.
