This special issue affirms that design, as a socio-material practice of problem-solving, has gained currency among a variety of actors – from governments and international organisations to civil society forums and community activists – to address increasingly complex and interwoven emergencies. As design historians have shown, involving designers and leveraging semi-codified design protocols like ‘design thinking’ to find ostensibly innovative solutions to ‘wicked problems’ is not a new phenomenon within the twin field of humanitarian aid and international development. However, in the face of global polycrisis, the pragmatic promises of design have expanded its appeal. A growing literature thus examines how the turn to design-led innovation in humanitarian aid and development reflects a reinvigorated belief in techno-utopianism, a tendency to bolster Western interventionism, and the reaffirmation of neoliberal market logics. At the same time, there remains a need for a differentiated understanding of how design is taken up and negotiated across scales, and beyond unidirectional North-to-South diffusion. The collection of articles maps how the rise of intersecting emergencies, allied with concerns for resilience, sustainability and, at times, social justice, has positioned design as a powerful, albeit fragmented, assemblage that has, over time, conjured different ideologies, politics and practices of change.
