The COVID-19 pandemic turned the lives of billions upside down, demanding a rapid response from governments, corporations, and medical professionals the world over. It also offered students and researchers the opportunity to study those responses in real-time.
During the summer of 2021, I worked with Prof. Carlos Teixeira and a group of students from the IIT Institute of Design and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, applying advanced design models to investigate examples of infrastructures being deployed in response to pandemics.
Together, we conducted a broad and shallow real-time analysis of interventions made in 5 focus areas across the US, Italy, South Korea, and China. By the end of the summer, the team created a report that captures a collection of infrastructures and the emerging possibilities enabled by their combinations.