Who we are

Mosquito-borne diseases represent one of the most dynamic frontiers of public health research and intervention. Climate change, population growth, rapid urbanisation and insecticide resistance are amplifying that risk across the globe, increasing the range and resilience of pathogen-carrying vectors and radically attenuating the conventional toolset used to combat them. At a critical juncture in global vector control policy, this project explores reconfiguration of knowledges and disciplinary skills to meet this ever-evolving challenge and, in the process, develop new modalities of global health innovation under conditions of material precarity. Bringing together international and local entomologists, architects, social scientists, public health specialists, engineers and artists, we will model novel strategies to tackle the wicked problem of mosquito control in Brazil and Tanzania. The team draws upon long-term interdisciplinary collaborations in these two countires and award-winning work in sustainable design to formulate integrative methodologies and operational frameworks for community-driven innovation.

Our team comprises internationally recognised practitioners in each individual field of practice with a proven record of interdisciplinary, innovative work. These disciplines and modes of practice are rarely combined at the level of design specifications. This unique collaboration, we hope, will break the mould of conventional ‘vector control’ and inject new ideas into the debate over how to address, more sustainably, the challenge of mosquito-borne diseases in fast-growing, informal urban habitats. In so doing, we seek to serve as a demonstration of what processes of co-design – between different disciplines, but also between designers and users – can contribute to the tackling of ‘wicked’ problems at the interface of public health, community participation/resistance, and rapidly shifting built environments. We believe this project can operate beyond its immediate instrumental goal to showcase a new way of bringing multiple forms of knowledge and practice to bear on highly recalcitrant problems.