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Paper short abstract

Drawing on participatory humanitarian design workshops in Colombia, this paper examines how speculative, reflexive futuring practices generate 'promissory capital' to re-imagine continuity of care and sustain caring futures amid humanitarian withdrawal.

Paper long abstract

Amid aid cuts and withdrawal of international humanitarian organizations in the Colombian Caribbean, continuity of care is increasingly shaped by provisional arrangements and uncertain technological futures. We examine how speculative and participatory design methods can support the re-imagination of care in such contexts, while remaining oriented toward concrete technological intervention.

Drawing on ethnographically informed co-design workshops conducted in two settings of humanitarian emergency, Necoclí and Barranquilla, with local health actors and international researchers, we conceptualise ReTooling Care as a process of participatory futuring grounded in situated humanitarian and local health expertise. The (ongoing) workshops work toward the development of a care-support tool (e.g. a chatbot), using case studies, design prompts, and provisional prototypes exploring what such a technology should do, for whom, and under which ethical and institutional conditions.

We conceptualize care as an affective socio-technical practice sustained through relationships among people, infrastructures, knowledge, and expectations. Within the workshops, speculative humanitarian design explores the complex terrain of negotiating tensions between continuity and interruption, local expertise and humanitarians, and technological promise and institutional fragility. We argue that encounters require and generate ‘promissory capital’ (Strathern 2012), an anticipatory and interdisciplinary force that sustains collaboration, commitment, and opens up imagination amid the global care crisis.

By tracing how promissory capital circulates through participatory design processes oriented toward technological intervention, we contribute to STS debates on speculative design, world-making, care, and global health. It shows how caring futures are not simply designed, but collectively negotiated at the intersection of ethnography, technology, and humanitarian governance.