#182 2013 · Better Shelter (IKEA Foundation, with UNHCR) · Humanitarian relief / shelterpiggyback
The refugee tent problem got solved by a flat-pack furniture company's own supply chain, not a new design
the problem
Emergency shelter needs to move fast, cheap, and at massive scale to wherever a crisis is, but the standard humanitarian tent is flimsy, lasts months rather than years, and offers no real security, privacy, or power
background
The standard UNHCR canvas tent has been the default emergency shelter for decades because it's light, cheap, and can be produced and shipped in bulk — but it typically lasts only around six months before needing replacement, offers minimal insulation, no real door lock, and no power source, for a displacement crisis that in practice often runs for years, not months. Building something more durable had usually meant either accepting a much higher unit cost and slower production, or a bespoke design effort disconnected from any organization that already knew how to manufacture and ship huge volumes of flat, easy-to-assemble structures cheaply.
The IKEA Foundation, working with UNHCR and refugee families in Iraq and Ethiopia who tested and iterated on early prototypes, built 'Better Shelter' by applying the exact discipline IKEA already used for furniture — flat-pack transport volume, tool-free assembly, standardized components, cost-engineered materials — to a refugee dwelling rather than a bookcase. The unit ships flat, assembles in 4 to 8 hours without additional tools, and comes with a solar panel and lamp built in.
the move
Rather than design a fundamentally new kind of shelter from first principles, the project treated refugee housing as a flat-pack logistics and assembly-engineering problem — the same discipline that lets a furniture retailer ship a wardrobe efficiently to any warehouse worldwide — producing a 17.5-square-metre unit for up to five people with an expected three-year lifespan, roughly six times the standard tent's usable life, at a cost and shipping volume still compatible with humanitarian-scale procurement.
the payoff
UNHCR placed an initial order for 10,000 units, and by later counts more than 90,000 Better Shelter units have been deployed across roughly 80 countries including Iraq, Greece, Djibouti, Chad and Serbia, housing displaced families for years longer per unit than the standard canvas tent it was designed to supplement.
what came after
Better Shelter won the Design Museum's Beazley Design of the Year award in 2016 and is a standard case study in humanitarian design and social-enterprise literature for applying an established commercial manufacturing and logistics discipline to a humanitarian problem, rather than treating humanitarian design as requiring an entirely separate design tradition from consumer products.
filed under
references
- [1]Dezeen — IKEA's flat-pack refugee shelters go into productionDezeen, 2015dezeen.com
- [2]UNHCR Canada — Flat-Pack ShelterUNHCR Canada, 2016unhcr.ca