Adaptent
ADAPT ︎SHIFT ︎UNFOLD
Tools of Transition
By the end of 2024, 83.4 million people were internally displaced globally—73.5 million by conflict and violence, and 9.8 million by disasters. Floods in Pakistan displaced 33 million people in a single season. Wildfires consumed homes across Mediterranean coastlines and North American forests. Hurricane-force storms battered communities from the Philippines to Florida with increasing regularity. Droughts turned fertile land to dust across East Africa, forcing millions from ancestral territories.
We have entered an era where "emergency" has become a sustained condition.
What was once considered temporary displacement—the aftermath of a singular catastrophic event—is transforming into something far more unsettling: permanent transience. Climate refugees, internally displaced persons, seasonal migrants fleeing predictable disasters—these categories are blurring into a new demographic reality. People are not just fleeing disaster; they are learning to move with it, anticipating it, adapting their entire way of life around environmental volatility.
The Adaptent explores this new reality of permanent mobility—a way of life structured around seasonal migration patterns, resource availability, and climate windows.
What does it mean to design for this reality—not with the optimism that it will end, but with the pragmatism that it will intensify?
The Adaptent, and the speculative world it inhabits, emerges from this question. It asks us to imagine what happens when we stop treating displacement as aberration and start treating it as a design challenge. When we acknowledge that millions of people will need to move—repeatedly, strategically, seasonally—and that they will need systems, infrastructure, and objects that support that movement with dignity rather than merely managing it as crisis.
Adapt,
Shift, Unfold
We are transported into a world of perpetual movement, where a seasonal migrant traverses different urban zones, enabled to move fluidily and swiftly with the help of light transformable gear that acts as both shelter and protection in different zones.
By day, the Adaptent
gear is protective wear;
by night, it is shelter.
It represents a fundamental shift from static, place-bound lifestyles toward fluid, responsive ways of inhabiting the world. It dissolves the boundary between shelter and clothing, constantly morphing to suit the needs of the wearer.
Exploring the materiality of movement—how fabric, structure, and form can serve several purposes, embracing mobility and flexibility as core principles for survival.
We confront new questions about survival, belonging, and adaptation:
+ What does it mean when we must carry our essentials with us?
+ Who gets to choose nomadism, and who is forced into it?
+ How does constant movement reshape the nature of home, community, identity?
+ What happens to rootedness, tradition, intergenerational knowledge when everything becomes portable?
