Over the last few decades construction using 3D printing has taken the world by storm. Additive manufacturing has enabled construction companies to build at unprecedented speeds, while minimising waste and labour. Furthermore, with 3D printing, the cost of construction is considerably reduced compared to traditional methods. The technology has also allowed designers to manifest impressive geometrically complex and architecturally interesting designs, which would otherwise be impossible to create. It is therefore no surprise that construction 3D printing is set for massive growth. In fact the global market for construction using 3D printing is expected to reach $114.4 million in 2023.

Its potential profitability has certainly not gone unnoticed, nor has its potential as a force for good. In the course of the last few years, several initiatives have been founded on this concept. Taking advantage of the efficiency, low cost, and sustainability it offers, using 3D printing for construction has become central to many humanitarian focused projects seeking to combat global issues ranging from housing shortages and homelessness to the education crisis. 

Construction 3D Printing and the Housing Crisis

According to the State of the Nation’s Housing Report published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), last year the supply of for-sale homes was at its lowest level since at least 1982. A statistic that was only worsened by the pandemic. However, it is not only a shortage of housing that the US faces, but also a persistent shortage of construction workers, which in turn functions to impede the development of new homes. JCHS reported that the average number of job openings for construction workers reached its highest level since at least 2001, at about 321,000 posts that needed to be filled in 2019. Moreover, the US also faces a crisis of affordability. According to Forbes, despite the overall economic turndown, house prices have soared in the last year and Americans across the country are struggling to afford homes. 

Virtual reality

Children around the world are growing up surrounded by war and violent conflict, leaving many with additional challenges like mental health disorders, PTSD, anxiety and chronic stress. One new solution may come via virtual reality.

In Iraq, we're piloting a program to help young people who have undergone trauma by creating a digital safe space using virtual reality to create a calming environment. This immersive technology can reach more people for less cost and can help renew the chance for a normal childhood.

Digital identity

The World Bank estimates that over 1 billion people worldwide are unable to provide identification proving who they are. Digital identity is essentially a person’s electronic fingerprint — their birth registration, vaccinations, educational certifications, and legal status, all stored online where it can’t get lost.

We have joined ID2020, a global alliance that includes Microsoft, GAHI, Ideo.org, Simprints, and a variety of other actors to help promote principles of “good” digital identity.

In Liberia, national biometric ID cards are already in use. Citizens are required to use their biometric identification (in the form of retina scans, fingerprints, or facial recognition) to open a bank account, register to vote, and obtain a driver's license.

Identification in a digital age matters because it reduces complex humans to records and systems, mostly categorised by others. Consider the refugee who is given a ‘refugee identity’ by UNHCR, or a female platform worker who is identified through a scan of the national ID she submits along with her profile. The term digital identity indicates the conversion of human identities into machine-readable digital data. As noted by Nyst et al. (Citation2016, pp. 8–9), such a conversion results in schemes that allow the digital identification of individuals, as well as their authentication at various points of access and, on that basis, authorisation for them to perform given actions or access given services. Digital identity schemes are schemes in which ‘the three functions of identification, authentication and authorisation are all performed digitally’ (Nyst et al., Citation2016): such schemes are hence different, for example, from schemes where the delivery of goods or services is digital, but the identification of recipients depends on paper-based identity cards or other documents.

The relation between digital identity and socio-economic development has been made explicit across multiple works (e.g. Caribou Digital, Citation2017; Dahan & Gelb, Citation2015; Gelb & Clark, Citation2013a, Citation2013b; Gelb & Metz, Citation2018; World Bank, Citation2016). While diverse links are suggested, a common basis lies in the recognition of an identity gap (Gelb & Clark, Citation2013a; UNICEF, Citation2013), which leaves people – and especially people in vulnerable countries and regions – uncovered by civil registration. While lack of a legal identity results in denial of essential rights (Nyst et al., Citation2016), its recognition provides the basis for individuals to be entitled with rights, receive public services, or benefit from much-needed forms of social assistance. As a result, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target 16.9 is framed in terms of reaching a ‘free and universal legal identity, including birth registration, by 2030.’

Within the broader picture of a link between legal identity and essential rights, digital identity emerges as a means putting technology at the service of socio-economic development (World Bank, Citation2016). In its diverse manifestations (Gelb & Metz, Citation2018), digital identity uses technology to guarantee the legal identity that makes people visible to providers as holders of rights, whether they are undocumented poor in urban slums or displaced persons fleeing war and persecution. As noted by the World Bank (Citation2016, p. 2), identification systems have three overarching development goals, framed as (a) inclusion and access to essential services (such as healthcare, education, voting rights, financial services and social safety nets); (b) effective, efficient and transparent administration of public services; and (c) greater accuracy in measuring progress on key development indicators, e.g. reductions in maternal and infant mortality. By strengthening existing identity systems and developing new, reliable ones where these are absent or weak, digital technology affords the possibility to build development through robust identification.

And yet, the so-constituted orthodoxy of ‘digital identity for development’ presents multiple issues.

Research highlights the importance of unpacking links between benefits attributed to digital identity schemes and their costs, firstly in terms of exclusion of legally entitled recipients (cf. Drèze et al., Citation2017; Khera, Citation2019; Muralidharan et al., Citation2016, Citation2020; Ramanathan, Citation2014). Determined at the stages of registration, authentication or assertion of identity (Hosein & Whitley, Citation2019), exclusions result in denial of essential services and may be associated to highly grave outcomes. In India, hunger deaths have been associated to digitally enforced exclusion from food security schemes (cf. Singh, Citation2019). In Kenya, migrants and refugees are barred from essential social assistance as a result of misrecognised IDs (Weitzberg, Citation2020). In addition, there is disproportionate impact on women because they often feel (heightened by socio-cultural norms) that they cannot justify the need for ID as compared to men (Bailur et al., Citation2019). This is particularly problematic in the case of digital gig economy work, which is seen as attractive for women, but where analogue infrastructures may not support their online work. For example, they may be paid for their work online but may not have a bank account or mobile money account, resulting into money being paid into their husband’s account (Caribou Digital, Citation2020).

There is also a component of how identification (a static process) captures one’s dynamic identity in a fairly immutable way which makes it much more challenging to change later. This is problematic for all, but impacts on those whose identity necessarily is fluid at the time, such as children, refugees or migrants. Caribou Digital’s research with UNICEF on children, identification and identity in Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon and Thailand illustrates how children and youth, born into identification systems, may not understand or struggle with fixed identities, exacerbated in the digital age (Bailur & Smertnik, Citation2020). They illustrate this with the case of Paul, in Kenya, who uses his brother’s national ID and M-Pesa account to get a small loan from the mobile loan app Tala but who is not aware of the repercussions for his brother if he does not pay that loan (Smertnik & Bailur, Citation2020a). Similarly, in Brazil, youth struggling to change their name and sexuality on their birth certificate and other credentials face numerous obstacles (Bailur et al., Citation2020), and young Syrian refugees in Lebanon feel their identity is so much more than a ‘refugee,’ but feel their identity as captured as such in digital identity systems only shows one side of them (Smertnik & Bailur, Citation2020b). Thus, identification while enabling human freedom in one sense can also restrict it, depending on who is doing the identifying.

For migrants and refugees, being labelled is problematic. Caribou Digital’s research in India (Caribou Digital, Citation2017) illustrates how migrants within India struggle with their ‘fixed identification’ when moving between states, a challenge that was further apparent during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 when migrants with ‘Mumbai’ as residence on Aadhaar cards could not take certain trains back to their home states because they were not considered as belonging to those states (Vaktania & Sharma, Citation2020). Janmyr and Mourad (Citation2018) illustrate how Syrians fleeing to Lebanon resent labels are imposed on them of ‘registered refugee,’ ‘labourer’ or other exogenously determined categories, detailing how such labels impact on them. This runs the risk that increasingly open digital platforms for identification may lead to the monopolisation of identification categories through network effects that force more stakeholders to use the same static categories, when these are actually fluid categories (Janmyr & Mourad, Citation2018). This is evident particularly in the link of identification to financial sectors, such as credit ratings, where a user may not be in control of what information is revealed about them or be able to explain it. The Black Mirror episode Nosedive always comes to mind as an illustration of how a woman’s life unravels because she is rated by strangers on everything she does.

Technology solutions to climate change, disaster response, and global health challenges are up for discussion in a new Lincoln Laboratory lecture series. 

The year 2030 serves as the resolution to the United Nation's Agenda for Sustainable Development. The agenda, adopted in 2015 by all UN member states including the United States, mobilizes global efforts to protect the planet, end poverty, foster peace, and safeguard the rights of all people. Nine years out from the target date, the sustainable development goals of the agenda still remain ambitious, and as relevant as ever.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has been growing its efforts to provide technology solutions in support of such goals. "We need to discuss innovative ways that advanced technology can address some of these most pressing humanitarian, climate, and health challenges," says Jon Pitts, who leads Lincoln Laboratory's Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group.

To help foster these discussions, Pitts and Mischa Shattuck, who serves as the senior humanitarian advisor at Lincoln Laboratory, recently launched a new lecture series, called the Future of Humanitarian Technology.

In the inaugural session on April 28, Lincoln Laboratory researchers presented three topics inherently linked to each other — those of climate change, disaster response, and global health. The webinar was free and open to the public.

Accelerating sustainable technology

Deb Campbell, a senior staff member in the HADR Systems Group, started the session with a discussion of how to accelerate the national and global response to climate change.

"Because the timeline is so short and challenges so complex, it is essential to make good, evidence-based decisions on how to get to where we need to go," she said. "We call this approach systems analysis and architecture, and by taking this approach we can create a national climate change resilience roadmap."

This roadmap implements more of what we already know how to do, for example utilizing wind and solar energy, and identifies gaps where research and development are needed to reach specific goals. One example is the transition to a fully zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) fleet in the United States in the coming decades; California has already directed that all of the state's new car sales be ZEV by 2035. Systems analysis indicates that achieving this "fleet turnover" will require improved electric grid infrastructure, more charging stations, batteries with higher capacity and faster charging, and greener fuels as the transition is made from combustion engines.

Campbell also stressed the importance of using regional proving grounds to accelerate the transition of new technologies across the country and globe. These proving grounds refer to areas where climate-related prototypes can be evaluated under the pressures of real-world conditions. For example, the Northeast has older, stressed energy infrastructure that needs upgrading to meet future demand, and is the most natural place to begin implementing and testing new systems. The Southwest, which faces water shortages, can test technologies for even more efficient use of water resources and ways to harvest water from air. Today, Campbell and her team are conducting a study to investigate a regional proving ground concept in Massachusetts.

"We will need to continuously asses technology development and drive investments to meet these aggressive timelines," Campbell added.

Improving disaster response

The United States experiences more natural disasters than any other country in the world and has spent $800 billion in last 10 years on recovery, which on average takes seven years.

"At the core of disaster support is information," said Chad Council, also a researcher in the HADR Systems Group. "Knowing where impacts are and the severity of those impact drives decisions on the quantity and type of support. This can lay the ground work for a successful recovery ... We know that the current approach is too slow and costly for years to come."

By 2030, Council contends that the government could save lives and reduce costs by leveraging a national remote sensing platform for disaster response. It would use an open architecture that integrates advanced sensor data, field data, modeling, and analytics driven by artificial intelligence to deliver critical information in a standard way to emergency managers across the country. This platform could allow for highly accurate virtual site inspections, wide area search-and-rescue, determination of road damage at city-wide scales, and debris quantifications.

"To be clear, there's no one-size-fits-all sensor platform. Some systems are good for a large-scale disaster, but for a small disaster, it might be faster for local transportation department to fly a small drone to image damage," Council said. "The key is if this national platform is developed to produce the same data as local governments are used to, then this platform will be familiar and trustworthy when that level of disaster response is needed."

Over the next two years, the team plans to continue to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. National Guard, national laboratories, and academia on this open architecture. In parallel, a prototype remote sensing asset will be shared across state and local governments to gain enthusiasm and trust. According to Council, a national remote sensing strategy for disaster response could be employed by the end of 2029.