inCitu at the 2024 Humanitech Summit, Australia
inCitu was named a top solution in the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge at the Humanitech Summit. With insights from rural Victoria, we showcased how AR fosters collaboration, trust, and disaster resilience. This milestone marks the start of exciting partnerships for impactful change.
"Existing systems and approaches often overlook local knowledge"
This was one of the messages from Day 1 of the Australian Red Cross Humanitech Summit in Melbourne, Australia. This year inCitu was honored to be named one of the top 3 solutions in the world for the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge in partnership with Leading Cities. inCitu Community Manager Nick Kaufmann travelled to Melbourne to participate in the Summit and present inCitu at the event's Tech Playground. You can read his personal reflections via Linkedin.
One goal of the resilience challenge was to identify solutions that could scale with local knowledge and help power data-driven disaster resilience. In the program, we learned that the humanitarian sector has become increasingly aware of the inefficiency of spending far more resources on post-disaster responses, than they could be by investing in community readiness. Investing in social and infrastructural preparedness and the social capital of communities themselves before disaster strikes is a paradigm shift in the humanitarian sector that sounds very similar to recent moves towards citizen participation in urban planning.
For inCitu, the Humanitech Summit was the culmination of a 6 month program. To get to the final stage, inCitu staff participated in a curriculum series, crafted a pilot submission for a specific community in rural Victoria, Australia, and passed multiple interviews about impact, local collaboration, and tech readiness. To say it feels like graduating from university is a testament to the efforts of our program leaders and the inspiring presentations and workshops they have curated for our cohort in the humanitarian track.
The co-design philosophy of the program aligned well with inCitu’s own theory of change: that alongside supporting completion of projects that meet housing, transit and environmental goals, highly accessible, engaging AR experiences can empower people and communities themselves: strengthening trust, the civic capacity to navigate uncertain futures, and the ability to come together when disaster strikes.
Real locals from Dargo, Victoria informed & evaluated our pilot proposals from their POV. Small communities are often on the leading edge of change, risk, & innovation. They pushed the limits of our technology and helped us imagine unlikely use-cases and accessibility improvements we could never have thought of alone.
Even in larger cities like our home in NYC, ordinary residents often have important knowledge and insights to offer transformational planning and development projects. inCituAR can be a powerful tool for gathering subject experts and locals in a new venue-- mixed reality-- where new conversations and opportunities can present themselves.
Our public conversations about the future are often dysfunctional because of unequal access to information or misunderstandings of what has been proposed. What if we could support better conversations by bringing people together around visualizations of the future from the sites of change themselves?
Whether it's urban planning, risk communication, disaster preparedness, or community building, we found ample opportunities for co-design with AR at the Humanitech Summit. Keep an eye out for some exciting collaborations that will surely arise from the important conversations in Naarm / Melbourne.
Deep thanks to program staff Julia Goodall, Samantha Clifford and Katy Southall , Lauren Hicks Michael Lake and Ava Halstead for your tireless efforts-- so excited that this is just the beginning!
https://www.humanitech.org.au/news/humanitarian-track-finalists/
