Most of the services that are designed for the refugees address their short-term needs for food, medicine, shelter, and legal support. However, they also need political right, job, education, and social support for their long-term empowerment and voice. While mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies often claim that they make computing services available everywhere, it turns out that those services are only for certain kind of mobility. When people are forced to leave their place, and move to a new one - they are often helpless, and such is the situation for millions of refugees today. Due to war, flood, famine, drought, and other natural and man-made disasters, thousands of people are moving from one place to another helplessly everyday. Mobile computing is seldom helpful for them. The objective of this project is, hence, to develop a diverse set of forced mobilities that people around the world are often exposed to, and build computing platform for supporting people there.

We conducted an ethnography with the evicted slum dwellers in Dhaka, and we documented the practices of making, hacking, and fixing among them. One member of our team built an award-winning portable mobile house for the homeless communities of Dhaka using local material and local expertise. Right now, we are working with the World Bank to develop a rich database of stories from the climate refugees all around the country. We are bringing the diverse voice, political opinions, grief, and frustrations of these marginalized people through a computational platform to make their voice hard to the wider communities of intellectuals, politicians, policy-makers, and social activists. This is also making a new space for design and a site for innovation.