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Humanitarian Engineering

Feb 3, 2021 | 2020 ISSUE, INITIATIVES & EVENTS

Humanitarian Engineering

2020 ISSUE, INITIATIVES & EVENTS

Written by Celine Dibo

The destiny of world civilization depends upon providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.” – Norman Borlaug
In this era full of fear and uncertainty, no one understands the importance of investing in helping those in need better than us. The events we are witnessing daily on a local and global scale strengthen empathy and compassion, two essential qualities for the actors of tomorrow. And what better way to apply the concepts we learn at the American University of Beirut (AUB), than in the context of a humanitarian course in which students find solutions to emerging health problems in the Arab region while meeting Sustainable Development Goals?

The intensive three-week course, “Design of Engineering Solutions for Health Challenges in Crises,” was developed by AUB and Boston University (BU). It encourages participants from multiple fields to use engineering design to address humanitarian challenges in protracted crises. The first week is theory-based with seminars, sessions, and briefs about refugees and global institutions. After that, students get the chance to apply the concepts with field trips and interviews with refugees to understand the problems faced. From there on, the brainstorming, ideation, design and prototyping phases of the solution begin. In the end, students prepare a pitch and present their projects to a jury to choose the winners of the hackathon. 

 

This year, the winning teams thought of new ways to help the refugees work, created a design that would prevent rain from flooding the tents while being stored for later use, and created a flashlight powered through shaking to see at night. When asked why they had chosen this course, most students explained that they wanted to test out and find an efficient way to apply the theory learned in class. One student says: “I was interested in taking the course because of the feedback I got from friends who took it in previous years. I also liked the fact that the course was practical rather than conceptual.”

 

 

Furthermore, the partnership with BU contributes to making the experience enriching for all participants by establishing a collaboration between students from different majors and countries. Diversity helped the teams find innovative approaches combining the points of view of different people, each adding to the creativity of the process. For example, BU students focus more on understanding the problem and its ramifications before brainstorming to find solutions while AUB students tend to look for the end product directly.

Diversity helped the teams find innovative approaches combining the points of view of different people, each adding to the creativity of the process.

Unfortunately, students were not able to implement their prototypes on a large scale due to the lack of funding, despite promising results. In the end, they gained experience in a primordial field aiming to elevate human standards and achieve equality, and this generates hope that today’s learners will become tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. In the meantime, what we can do is encourage investing in the future and provide similar opportunities to aspiring engineers to start thinking about how to restructure the world as we know it.

 

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