Fabrizio Urettini on design and the refugee crisis

How can design help to curb the human tragedy of the global refugee crisis? In this episode, our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn interviews Fabrizio Urettini, the Italian art director, who has devoted the last six years to designing and delivering a remarkably imaginative and effective response to one of our biggest global challenges - the escalating refugee crisis. Helped by friends and fellow designers, Fabrizio has founded and run the Talking Hands workshops in the northern Italian city of Treviso where asylum seekers and migrants living temporarily in the area can learn design and making skills.

Fabrizio tells Alice how hundreds of refugees and migrants have participated in the programme since he opened Talking Hands in a derelict army barracks in 2016. They have designed and made furniture, toys, and clothing for sale online and in local craft markets, and collaborated with nearby manufacturers and artisans, while learning new skills or enhancing old ones that could eventually help them to secure paid employment. As well as enabling asylum seekers and migrants to use their time in Treviso productively, Talking Hands runs language and literacy classes for them, and has had a significant impact on changing local perceptions of refugees.

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At a time when more than 100 million people, a historic record, have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict or oppression to seek asylum elsewhere in the global refugee crisis, Talking Hands demonstrates how designers and other creatives can help to foster positive change by empowering them to build productive lives in their new countries.

You’ll find images of the projects described by Fabrizio in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms. Thank you for listening. Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other global design leaders in different fields and different parts of our planet.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

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