Flood Relief Kit Design Sprint | Care USA
Design for Social Impact • Humanitarian relief • Design Sprint • Prototyping
While working in the Social Innovation Vertical at T-Works, India's Largest Prototyping Centre, as a designer, I contributed to a four-day design sprint organized by the NGO Care USA, which was working towards making disaster response more decentralized and human-centric by designing and prototyping relief kits in partnership with T-Works. The sprint brought together product and communication designers, engineers, NGO partners, and researchers.
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GALLERY
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REFLECTIONS
April 2024
Designer, Design sprint participant
Secondary Research, Design Thinking, Sketching, Ideation, Mapping
Krishna Vamshi, Anirudh, Simran, Harsha
Design directions for further development for the Care flood relief kit
Stills from the sprint, handling the kit to understand the stakeholders' context, ideation sketches, and work in progress. Picture Credits: Uday
At the outset, The Care team introduced us to the previously developed ATOM-ZLT (Zero Lead Time) earthquake relief kit for hilly terrains. Designed to enable immediate community-led response, the kit contained essential components for shelter, water purification, solar energy, and hygiene to sustain families until state aid arrived. Having previously directed an in-house film about the ATOM kit in my role as a communication designer, I joined the sprint with significant context and clarity. The new challenge focused on humanitarian relief in urban environments exacerbated by climate change, such as cloudbursts and coastal flooding. This meant the kit had to include heavy-duty tarps and be meticulously designed to protect components from water damage.
The sprint brought together product and communication designers, engineers, NGO partners, and researchers. The interdisciplinary setup made the process both rigorous and grounded—each decision had to pass through lenses of feasibility, cost, logistics and lived experience. We focused on designing for plains floods and informal settlements, and gathered literature on families who had experienced displacement, waterlogging, and unstable ground conditions during disaster. The CARE team shared critical insights from their field testing of the ATOM kit in Nepal with earthquake-affected communities, where a primary concern had been ergonomics and user friendliness.
Most relief kits, though well-intentioned, were often heavy, cumbersome, and poorly adapted for movement. We wanted to reduce this risk in our focus areas of waterlogged or debris-laden disaster zones, and treated the original ATOM kit as a case study to analyse what worked and what demanded rethinking for flood-prone regions in India.
Our key considerations included the necessity of modular or wearable carrying systems to keep hands free in unstable conditions; the selection of materials capable of withstanding prolonged moisture and chemical exposure; and the strict prioritization of contents essential for the first 72 hours. We also evaluated the buoyancy of the kit, its visibility in low-light, and the ease of opening closures and accessing components for users with limited dexterity, or those in high-stress environments. The process moved between research, ideation, and prototyping. We mapped kit contents, from menstrual hygiene products to lighting solutions, as well as overall structure, constantly negotiating weight, cost, and durability.
Unlike speculative studio projects, this sprint demanded immediate realism. Every decision was tethered to manufacturability, scalability, and NGO distribution systems. I contributed my strengths in systemic thinking, synthesis of complex secondary research, and creative problem-solving, and consistently urged my fellow participants to move beyond the "able-bodied adult man" archetype that so often dominates design assumptions.
This project reminded me of the reason I had wanted to become a designer in the first place; here, my sensibilities of balancing systemic critical thinking with deep empathy had found an apt place. In moving beyond a theoretical user to navigate the harsh realities of supply chains, strict budgets, and unpredictable field conditions, I saw how my skills readily met the rigors of real-world problem scenarios and responsive design frameworks.
My understanding of design is that it is the deliberate and intuitive act of imagining what else is possible; an ongoing practice of envisioning that which doesn’t exist yet and bettering that which already does. This outlook is a constant in my work across all mediums—from filmmaking and art direction to exhibition design and speculative writing—yet, I found it to resonate most meaningfully when anchored in service of human dignity, especially in moments of profound crisis.