Competition: Design for Relief
The Design for Relief competition challenges students to use their technical and creative skills to design and prototype solutions for aid during emergency and conflict zones. We want to solve problems such as: How do you get clean drinking water and electricity when the services are down? How do you provide prosthetics when transport and medical infrastructure is damaged or destroyed?
As an engineering student, your ideas can significantly improve people's lives. Your solutions will also have a broader impact than just within Palestine. They will be within an open-source repository which will be usable for future emergency and conflict situations.
At Justice and Relief, we care about actions more than words. If your solution is selected, our organisation will do everything it can to make it easily accessible and available worldwide. The reward will be the fulfilment of helping people in need, as well as a great addition to your technical/design resume.
Prosthetics
The first category is abouth Justice and Relief's origins, which are grounded in the inspiration we got from Dr. ir. G. Smit who is responsible for designing technical solutions for prosthetics to aid the victims of the people of Ukraine. He designed solutions for much needed prosthetics when the demand was too high for the supply. He designed both functional and esthetic prosthetics to provide and succeeded in doing so. He both helped the people in Ukraine and inspired others to use their technical skills to help mankind.Â
The challenge in Palestine is a lack of medical infrastructure and the personalisation of the fit to the body of the prosthetic limbs. To gain more information about this challenge, please register using the application form.
Electricity
The second category that Justice and Relief is working on is how to gather and store electricity when the net is down. We are currently in the process of designing manuals to produce generators from old car parts as they are widely available in the region. Electricity can be stored using car batteries, but there are also other solutions possible like using gravitational energy to store electricity with ropes and pulleys.Â
These are some of the solutions we are working on but we are sure that your technical and creative brains can come up with better solutions than this! We challenge you to design in this confined context to light the tents and streets of Palestine as this is much needed for the safety of the vulnerable.Â
Water
The third problem category is the essence of life; water! The destruction of infrastructure for water has lead to the lack of availability of water for the displaced families. The lack of clean water has resulted in the spreading of diseases and famine. The people in Gaza and other places around the world with a lack of drinking water are in need of your help.Â
We are looking into solutions like desalination, condensation, ground water filtration and rain water collection, but the problem is far from being solved. That is why your help is in high demand to relief the people in Palestine.Â
Open application
The fourth category includes an open application for you to propose your own challenge area term and solution space for the short or the long term. There are many unexplored areas yet to be worked on and we are open to all good and helpful ideas.
Possible suggestions can include shelter, safety and security, mental health in refugee camps, finances, food, infrastructure, education, rebuilding etc. We are looking forward to your proposals!
Application Form