Design for Ukraine’s heritage: engaging international students during times of war through design activism

The Russian invasion of Ukraine which began in February 2022 has caused, and continues to inflict, a substantial number of deaths and destruction of buildings, including museums, cultural institutions, and heritage. Despite the instruments of international law put in place to protect cultural heritage, alarming reports of the removal and displacement of museums’ collections from occupied areas continue to emerge. In the amid of this complex context, how can design researchers and educators prompt students towards the development of contributions for emergencies such as war? Can digital platforms be used to support such development? And how can these technologies be employed to safeguard and raise awareness about at-risk heritage? Drawing from the legacy of design activism and socially responsible design, the research aims to provide an answer to these questions, presenting the results of the Design for Ukraine’s Heritage (D4UH) experience. D4UH is an educational project, the first step of a broader strategy that has the goal of creating a network of European institutions and NGOs to envision and develop possible solutions to safeguard the Ukrainian museums’ heritage during and after times of war. D4UH pairs 20 Ukrainian museums with 20 international students from architecture and design schools, united by the desire to give support to the Ukrainian heritage. Partners, students and museums are asked to collaborate in the collection of videos, pictures and interviews to design the Virtual Museum of Ukrainian Museums, which acts as a statement of Ukrainian museums’ current situation. Offering the chance of engaging, researching, curating and designing the virtual exhibition’s narrative space, students and design educators can directly experience how the action of designing can tackle intricate cultural, social and political issues. The expected results of the project are, in fact, not merely to exhibit Ukrainian cultural heritage, but also to consider the relevance of museum institutions themselves as guardians of temporality to be interpreted and protected, especially in times of war, because of their contribution to the community’s progress.