Design for Vulnerables: challenges, understanding, focusing and strategies applied in the central US-Mexico border

The increasingly rapid and disruptive changes that are affecting our society require deep reflections on the new emergencies and the appropriate strategies to adopt. Our responsibility, as designers, requires us to reconsider the existing design processes, the objectives and the strategies, especially when the focus are the most vulnerable communities: as matter of fact, in these contexts, the political, economic and technological mechanisms to face contemporary radical changes are less and weaker. The research project "Design for Vulnerables", funded by the Observatorio de Ciudades of Tecnológico de Monterrey, has developed a methodological proposal to address architectural and urban design in vulnerable communities by combining, in a revisited "Krebs Circle", a methodology for the definition of Challenges, Understanding, Focus and Strategies. The different dimensions of Anthropocene, Technology, Person and Environment are combined by linking the global and local scales, as well as the goals and tools of design processes. The paper (1) will explain this methodological proposal, which is the result of a year-long research conducted with the residents of the vulnerable community "Paso del Norte" (Chihuahua capital, Mexico), and (2) will describe its first application to a design studio with the vulnerable communities of "Riveras del Bravo" and "Kilometro 29” of Ciudad Juárez. The application of this methodology highlights (1) how the environmental and social dimensions of vulnerabilities are increasingly connected; (2) how the emergencies that can be approached by architectural practice are transversal to contemporary disciplinary boundaries; and (3) how the definition of solutions must pass from the discussion between the different disciplines.