Rute Fiadeiro

Humanitarian designs relationship with women in disasters

Many parts of the world are facing overlapping disasters of conflict and climate-related crisis. These are often coupled with societal threats of misogyny and political repression. So when a disaster occurs it is often those who sit within these societal threats that are most effected by the disaster. Namely, women.

During the disaster response, humanitarian assistance is provided to aid the affected communities in their recovery. This may include material goods (products), recovery programmes (services), coordination of recovery efforts (systems) and more. How these recovery strategies are designed and implemented can be vital to how the community will recover from the disaster. With this in mind, the research seeks to study how humanitarian design is incorporated into these recovery strategies and its effects on women. More specifically, the research will seek to understand what (if any) might be humanitarian designs role in challenging gendered structures during disaster recovery by working in relation to women.

School, Centre or Area

School of Design

Area of expertise

Supervisors

Funding

London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP)

More about Rute

Biography

Rute Fiadeiro is a design researcher and product design engineer interested in designs application to gender and humanitarian contexts.

Rute graduated from Brunel University London with a BSc (Hons) in Product Design Engineering. During her time at Brunel, she took part in a Brunel funded volunteer programme in Indonesia where halfway through an earthquake occurred in Lombok (2018). In response, the programme team redirected their efforts to developing a mutual aid group to support the disaster response. This experience coupled with the development of her undergraduate project, ReCleft (a reusable cleft palate training simulator for low-resource countries), led to her interest in understanding further the role of design in humanitarian contexts, which later on focused on the gender dimension during her MRes at the RCA.

Since the beginning of her studies at the RCA, Rute has been actively interested in developing a feminist research and practice towards her work.