OPEN RELIEF

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, and LATRA from...

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 displacement. Every group...

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 climates, cultures...