Designing for Resilience: Industrial Design Responses to Climate Vulnerability in Coastal Communities of Bayelsa State

Coastal communities in Bayelsa State, South South Nigeria, face compounding climate vulnerabilities including rising sea levels, intensifying storm surge events, saltwater intrusion into freshwater sources, and accelerating coastal erosion, creating complex design challenges that existing resilience frameworks have inadequately theorised. This doctoral study develops an original Designing for Resilience Framework through a sustained participatory design research programme embedded within four coastal communities in Southern Ijaw and Ekeremor local government areas of Bayelsa State over twenty-four months. Drawing on climate adaptation theory, community resilience frameworks, and design activism scholarship, the research employs a participatory action research methodology involving community co-investigators, traditional knowledge holders, climate scientists, and design researchers in an iterative cycle of vulnerability assessment, design intervention development, implementation, and evaluation. Fourteen design interventions are developed and implemented spanning housing adaptation, portable water purification, flood-resilient fishing equipment storage, and community emergency communication systems. Each intervention generates both practical design outcomes and theoretical knowledge about the conditions, principles, and limitations of design-led climate adaptation in resource-constrained coastal contexts. The Designing for Resilience Framework that emerges from this process introduces the concepts of adaptive design flexibility, community design memory, and material climate literacy as theoretical constructs essential for contextualising design responses to climate vulnerability in African coastal communities. The framework advances both climate adaptation theory and design activism scholarship. Keywords: climate resilience, coastal communities, participatory design, Bayelsa State, design activism.