Art Lab Design Thinking Jam

The Art Lab Design Thinking Jam is a joint one-day co-creation workshop organized by UNESCO, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). It will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Martin Bodmer Foundation, on 26 February 2020, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the mandate on cultural rights and on the margins of the 43rd session of the Human Rights Council. Cultural operators and foundations working in the field, UN colleagues, engaged artists, former refugees will develop together the outline of a prototype tool to enable humanitarian and development operators to better integrate art and culture into their work.

Participants will appreciate the diversity and the relevance of inclusive artistic approaches in building resilience among victims of discrimination and marginalization. Cultural operators and artists will address the obstacles encountered and the conditions necessary for the development of artistic practices. Representatives of organizations working with those who have left everything behind and those who were left behind will inform participants about their structural environment and the contexts in which they work, including the reality of migrant, displaced or extremely poor people.

Together, they will address the following challenge: why are the arts and culture, whose powers are transformative for people in vulnerable situations, not used more often? During the ideation phase, participants will create and focus on solutions that respond to this issue. This phase will be followed by the elaboration of a prototype likely to be developed to enable organizations to better integrate art and culture into their work, for the purposes of social reintegration and citizen participation of the most deprived.

Participants will also be invited to evaluate during a piloting phase, whose scope and duration will be defined jointly, the potential of the solutions developed during the Design Thinking Jam, in terms of desirability, feasibility and sustainability.

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Launched by UNESCO in December 2018, the Art Lab for Human Rights and Dialogue has the ambition to integrate arts and culture into humanitarian and development programmes in a more mainstream way. It compiles, tests, analyzes and synthesizes initiatives using cultural and artistic approaches to enable marginalized people to recover their human dignity and their voice, in order to develop training tools and share practices that contribute to their re-integration into society.