As part of our 2/3rd year undergraduate course SOCL325 Disasters: Why do things go Wrong? we organised a ‘Disaster Mobilities & Design Salon’. The aim was to enable interdisciplinary collaborations between sociology, media and cultural studies and design students.
Disasters are often an opportunity for innovation (…’necessity is the mother of invention’). Most recent examples include innovations around social media use in crises, with ‘crisis mappers’ and ‘digital humanitarians’ entering the scene of disasters and disaster response. However, it is not easy to design new processes and technologies that genuinely and usefully support emergency planning and response.
We therefore brought sociology and design students together to exchange knowledge and discuss challenges and opportunities for innovation in disaster management. Sociology students brought knowledge of social and material practices, as well as sociological tools for analysing what happens in disasters and an awareness of wider societal dimensions. The design students brought design plans, developed in collaboration with Lancashire County Council’s Emergency Planning team.
Interdisciplinary extra-curricular events like this provide opportunities for mutual learning and interdisciplinary teamwork, as well as insights into how efforts to ‘apply’ research to practical challenges can inspire and inform theoretical and conceptual scholarly enquiry.
