Intervention——-Artefect——-Fragile
How can design be used to facilitate constructive and meaningful dialogue about homeless problem in Islington?
Daily inspiration:
Inspired by works of Rapheal Domenech that I watched previously, and recent visit to charity and homelessness settlements, this time I use an artefect-based intervention. The reason is that I am going to explore how can I better communicate the pressing issue of homeless problem and foster a constructive dialogue in a wider scale.
I made three “chairs”, named them “fragile”. I put these chairs in side our college for a week. I have two reasons, firstly, I want to test on the reation of people that are not in direct responses with homeless people, people that I usually don’t get in touch with for my research, like the college student who have similar age as I; second, our college is swish, slow, and a bit of nostalgic. This kind of envirenment is a perfect place for nurturing creativity, in a relatively safe and focused way.
The materials are wooden crates, cardboard box, papers, and plastic crates, the elements very common in homelessness community.
To me the word “Fragile” communicate the reality of homelessness acurately: they live with furnitures or objects like cardboradbox or wooden crates(something very temporary), and they have little resources to ensure their health and safety, they also have different level of health issues mentally or physically. But meanwhile, homeless problem seems not “fragile” at all, it has grounded in our society and become a common social phenomenon. I expect the artefect can make people to ask why and take actions, left comments through scanning the QR code.
The contents are Mechanism of Homelessness in 3 different angles: Edgework, Reflexive Governance, Agency and Structure. I had sticked my literature review(which I wrote in the blog before) on each topic with a drawing by myself together in every crate. Also, I put hashtag for homeless to allow people to understand the pervalence of the issues(the #homeless has 1.8m posts in instagram).
I also put a note book at the end site of crates for people to “write a letter to homeless people you don’t know”.
Edgework
Reflexive Governance
Agency and structure
Result
This time, I was faild. With only four to scan the QR code, and my whole work is accidentally dumped by stuff at the end of the week. Even though I had left me contact details of my email address and telephone numbers in my work.
What do you think the most impressive aspect of this exhibition?
What do you think the most impressive aspect of this exhibition?
What went well?
Although the work is been binned, I had photo copy of all my work which allows me to reflect and ask for stakeholders feedbacks. Also, I am happy to see some of people had left their feedbacks for me, in the features of exhibition and the appreciation of knowledge of this intervention.
What I had Learned
The reason I doing this intervention is hope to raise people’s curiousity to take action and learning, but obviously it does not work right now.
It can be the problem of missinterpretation. The work should be more engaging with more refinement in my presentation in terms of narratives and aesthetic, with even bolder creativity, and wider sensorial system that can expand. It can allow people to make sense at once. The security guy witness the hall everyday and told me that people expected to see a art work with some sort of “presence” in this kind of environment. “Your work is like cardboard boxes and stuff which can easily be missinterpreted into waste.”
The decision I made after this intervention are as follows:
- Have a investigation on available street creative/art exhibitions.
- Looking for narratives, poets, myths that are related to the topic and meanwhile resonate with people.
- Meanwhile, I will continue to applied imagination into practice. I will try to reflect and concentrate my unique experience in working with homeless charity, my experience in facing homeless issue into new and different kinds of artefects with different topics, which aim to help people to better understand the criticality of homeless problem.