Open Relief Blog

On 30 September and 1 October 2026, the three OPEN RELIEF partners met in Zagreb, Croatia, to learn from each other. Our coordinator, IM INDUSTRIES, hosted the partner capacity-building exchange alongside the project's mid-term meeting. Each partner brought expertise shaped by a different crisis context: Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design (KNUTD) from Ukraine's frugal, citizen-led innovation under conflict, IM INDUSTRIES from Croatia's earthquake recovery, an

Between May and August 2026, the three project partners held ten focus groups with members of their local Communities of Practice in Croatia, Ukraine and Greece. In total, 105 people took part, 55 of them women. They included first-time volunteers, designers and creative professionals, humanitarian and civil protection staff, psychologists and social workers, healthcare workers, local authorities and educators, as well as people with lived experience of migration and displace

When we picture crisis response, we tend to picture logistics: trucks, tents, supply chains, spreadsheets. We rarely picture a designer. Yet some of the most persistent failures in emergency preparedness are, at root, design failures - and fixing them will take the very skills that the cultural and creative sectors have in abundance. Consider the objects that fill emergency kits and relief distributions. Too many are single-use, awkward to repair, and poorly matched to the cl

A Community of Practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and who deepen their knowledge by interacting regularly. The term was coined by researchers Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, and the idea is deceptively simple: people learn best not in isolation, but together - by sharing problems, comparing approaches and building knowledge collectively over time. What sets a Community of Practice apart from a mailing list or a network is that

Frugal innovation is the art of doing more with less: designing effective solutions using the fewest possible resources, and making them affordable, accessible and easy to maintain. It is less about big budgets and cutting-edge labs, and more about ingenuity - solving real problems with what is actually available. The concept is often associated with resource-constrained settings, where necessity drives creativity. A water filter made from locally sourced materials, a chargin

When disaster strikes or people are forced to flee, humanitarian agencies respond with what are known as Core Relief Items, or CRIs - the standard bundle of essentials that helps a family survive the first days and weeks. Blankets, sleeping mats, jerry cans, kitchen sets, tarpaulins and solar lamps: developed and distributed at scale, most famously by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), CRIs are the backbone of emergency response worldwide. They exist for good reason. Standardised

In March 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Preparedness Union Strategy – a set of thirty actions designed to help Europe cope with an era of overlapping crises, from floods and wildfires to pandemics, cyberattacks, and armed conflict. One recommendation quickly caught the public's attention: every household should be able to look after itself for at least the first 72 hours of an emergency. The logic is simple. After a major incident, it can take emergency services u

On 24 and 27 March 2026, the OPEN RELIEF consortium came together online for the project's official Kick-off Meeting, bringing together partners from Croatia, Greece, and Ukraine to launch a new European collaboration focused on humanitarian design, crisis preparedness, and community resilience. Held over two dedicated working sessions, the meeting marked the beginning of an ambitious Creative Europe project that will explore how culture, creativity, and open-source innovatio