Designing for justice and/ or for the Majority World
2023
Design Toolkit: AI and Responsible Journalism
Team: Tomasz Hollanek and Abdullah Hasan Safir
Synopsis: The Toolkit is intended for a broad range of stakeholders shaping public perceptions of AI. It aims to empower journalists, PR specialists, and researchers to communicate the risks and benefits of AI more responsibly: to avoid perpetuating problematic AI narratives, to foster inclusivity and diversity in discussions about AI, and to promote critical AI literacy. It includes, with many other useful resources, a database of the AI experts representing minoritised stakeholders groups which we believe will help communicators draw on a diversity of perspectives on AI.
The toolkit is available here.
2017 - Ongoing
Designing with Internally Displaced Population in Bangladesh: Hope Beneath the Anxieties of Displacement
Team: Abdullah Hasan Safir, Nusrat Jahan Mim, S M Taiabul Haque, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Project Synopsis: Starting from 2017, we are trying to advance critical computing and design scholarship around marginalization and resistance by deepening the idea of 'hope' in this project. Based on our year-long ethnography with the internally displaced people (IDP) at Mohakhali and Kalyanpur areas in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we report various dynamic properties of ‘hope’(both at personal and communal levels) support this community to act, react, and/or resist many urban adversities they experience in their quotidian lives . We also explore how solidarity and sense of justice has been playing a crucial role to create social bond for a community who are constantly threatened to leave their houses by the powerful entities of the state.
Find our project website here.

As part of this project, I also studied the lack of social inclusion as one of the major problems of IDPs through the eyes of an environmental engineer. My research framework involved building up a model to improve accessibility to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and billing services by combining engineering and technological solutions along with community involvement and a substantial shift in public policy as well as justification of the model by extensive field research in Shattola slum in Dhaka. The discussion related with the accessibility to clean water and sanitation re-conceptualize the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 for the climate victims. This research also intended to provoke discussions around the inclusive potential design or policy based interventions to approach these challenges.
Project Outcomes:
Forthcoming
Paper: Resilient Hope: Identity, Extensibility, and Freedom among the Internally Displaced Populations (IDP) in Urban Bangladesh. Abdullah Hasan Safir, Nusrat Jahan Mim, S. M. Taiabul Haque, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. [Under review, details will be added later]
2021
Abdullah Hasan Safir, Nusrat Jahan Mim, S. M. Taiabul Haque, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. 2021. Designing with the internally displaced slum dwellers in Bangladesh. Interactions 28, 2 (March - April 2021), 52–54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3447990 .
2018
Abdullah Hasan Safir. 2018. Social Inclusion of Internally displaced people through improved accessibility to WASH facilities. (A Case study on the success of WASH projects in Shattola Slum). [Undergraduate Thesis]
2017
Abdullah Hasan Safir, Faheem Hussain, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, “HCI and Forced Mobility: Revisiting SDGs for the IDPs in Bangladesh”, CHI 2017 Symposium on HCI across Borders, Denver, Colorado, 2017 (Workshop Paper, Extend Abstract). [Link]
2018 - Ongoing
Designing with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Situating ICTs at Cross-border Displacement
Team: Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, P.J. Wall, Zulkarin Jahangir, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Project Synopsis: Based on our years long ethnographic research with the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, we build on a rich body of literature on development sociology and philosophy to demonstrate how the refugees infrastructure their hope through various artful practices of solidarity, leadership, and negotiation, and how ICT plays an important role in and around each of these practices. We discuss how our study further contributes to the ongoing discourse in ICT4D around aspiration, hope, design, and empowerment.
Project Outcomes:
2020
Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Dina Sabie, Zulkarin Jahangir, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. 2020. Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh. In Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 12, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3392561.3394640.
Abdullah Hasan Safir, Faheem Hussain, and P.J. Wall, “Information Flow Pathways for Rohingya Refugees: Challenges, Resilience and Innovations”, In Proceedings for Research-in-Progress Papers, Page: 242-244, the Future of Digital Work: The Challenge of Inequality, IFIP Joint Working Conference, Hyderabad, India, 2020.
2019
Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Zulkarin Jahangir, “Evaluating the impact of fake news on displaced population: experiences with Rohingya Refugees from Myanmar”, International Conference on the Rohingya Crisis in Comparative Perspective, University College London, 2019. [Conference Presentation]
Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Zulkarin Jahangir, “Rethinking access to information: the missing links and undiscussed questions of exclusion in Rohingya camps”, International Conference on Rohingya Crisis in Bangladesh: Challenges and Sustainable Solutions, North South University, July, 2019. [Conference Presentation]