Announced on July 1, these are the five winning ideas from a pool of 631 design proposals from 70 countries.

A welcoming ID card

The Green Card is an RFID-chip ID card linked to refugees’ individual asylum petitions. The temporary ID also informs them about language courses, maps, transportation routes and key places in their new communities, to help newcomers orient and acclimate.

Image for article titled Five design innovations for Europe’s refugee crisis, vetted by Ikea’s head of design
Image: The Green Card Team

“Hipster” pop-up homes

AGRIshelter is an easy-to-build temporary shelter that addresses the housing shortages. Structures are made from bales of straw and canvas, and incorporate features that encourage occupants to grow their own food—conveniently, something that hipsters also love, notes Milan-based architect, Narges Mofarahian. The 35 square meter units are designed to be erected on vacant urban lots, preventing ghettos from forming at the edge of the city.

Image for article titled Five design innovations for Europe’s refugee crisis, vetted by Ikea’s head of design
Image: Narges Mofarahian/What Design Can Do

Mobile kitchens and home cooking

Food fosters friendships. Eat & Meet is food truck business where newly-arrived refugees and migrants can cook, sell food and introduce their culture and culinary traditions with their host communities. The Brazil-based interdisciplinary design team explains that Eat & Meet operates on the ”age-old natural law that eating a stranger’s food is the first form of inter-cultural trust.”

Eat & Meet: Food for Understanding
Eat & Meet: Food for Understanding
Image: Jennifer Kinnunen, Marie Legleye, Camille Marshall, Elias Sougrati, Camille Marshall

A photo agency by refugees

Reframe Refugees is a stock photo agency produced and published by refugees about their plight. “The photos of refugees shown by mainstream media all look the same and, more importantly, only present refugees in desperate and helpless situations,” observed Dutch designers Marie-Louise Diekema and Tim Olland. Reframe Refugees would allow refugees to create their own images and narratives and license them to media companies.

Image for article titled Five design innovations for Europe’s refugee crisis, vetted by Ikea’s head of design
Image: What Design Can Do

A refugee-run design studio

Makers Unite is a design practice where refugees upcycle materials from the humanitarian crisis, turning life vests to fashionable bags and creative accessories. “Among us refugees living in Europe now, are many designers, artists, makers—creative people,” says Syrian architect Hend Charaf in the project video. Makers Unite gives these displaced designers ”the first steps for refugees to regain dignity, to connect with locals, to build new networks and to restart their lives.”

Image for article titled Five design innovations for Europe’s refugee crisis, vetted by Ikea’s head of design
Image: Makers Unite/What Design Can Do

Each winning idea won its creators €10,000 in seed money and expert guidance to develop their ideas. What Design Can Do has committed to deploying one or more of these design proposals by December 2016.

Speaking about the quality of entries, judges commended designers for thinking deeply about the complex issue, instead of focusing on beautiful forms. ”It’s great that so many designs propose new systems, new processes and new services,” says UNHCR’s Corinne Gray. “We tend to narrow the scope of design, but this shows just what it can do.”

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