Community-led design capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

COVID-19 threats have been impacting disadvantaged communities even harder. This paper looks into challenge areas and community responses to those in Brazilian informal settlements during the COVID-19 pandemic. These were identified through online roundtables with community members and representatives of NGOs in five Brazilian informal settlements. Our findings show how community members unconsciously design, deploying community-led (or diffuse) design capabilities to tackle COVID-19 challenges. These capabilities have been critical to coping with the immediate effects of the pandemic in communities. However, they are limited to short-term and reactive strategies. We argue that these natural problem-solving skills can be enhanced through a transition from diffuse to co-design capabilities to further harness community creativity towards better futures; extending community-led design capabilities into challenges and opportunity areas in a more strategic way for communities. This research contributes to filling the gap in design studies on how and to which extent communities unconsciously design

Design for Resilience:Mapping the Needs of Brazilian Communities to Tackle COVID-19 Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the urgency in the search for innovative solutions in different areas of knowledge to mitigate the effects and impacts of the disease, whether on health, social or economic terms. Urban and socio-economic determinants of informal-settlement communities make COVID-19 challenges even harder to be overcome, requiring local and situated solutions that consider their livelihood diversity. This manuscript shows the results of an exploratory pilot study which addressed the potential of participatory design to contribute to mitigating COVID-19 effects and impacts, identifying the problems, adaptative strategies, challenges for and needs of Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte communities. It was drawn from triangulation of methods and analysis of multiple (primary and secondary) data sources. The needs of communities were raised through online roundtables with community members, representatives of NGOs, designers, architects and researchers. Analysis of the roundtables was conducted collaboratively by the researchers through online tools, including Affinity Mapping, and 5 Whys. The findings point out the needs of communities clustered in 6 major themes, five of which indicate potential areas in which participatory design can play a meaningful role and need to be further investigated