Re-branding homelessness: design as activism?
I may be getting cynical in my old age, but I really don’t see how “re-branding” homelessness, and in ways that prohibit personalisation, is a “humanitarian act.” I mean, what kind of activism holds that when the homeless and overprivileged suburban children sleep in the same product, the world is a better place? But then again, maybe I just don’t get this kind of “design culture.”
Urban Nomad Shelter by Electroland
“Concepts” Best of Category - I.D. Magazine 51st Annual Design Review
“In name and form, the vivid inflatable contradicts a stereotype of cardboard-box vagrancy. The two partners of the Los Angeles-based Electroland conceived the Urban Nomad Shelter as both a ‘humanitarian act and as a social provocation.’ They created a cushion from the ground that also serves as a census taker for an itinerant population that is hard to count and even harder to countenance…
The Urban Nomad Shelter uses a self-conscious ‘design culture’ aesthetic (think Target or Ikea) to re-brand the homeless and re-map urban real estate. The neon-colored cocoons work like soft pushpins on a city plan, making it impossible not to see the homeless and not to see them as human…
It is easy to imagine the shelters in contexts closer to what most Americans call home. With their retro, biomorphic forms and colors to find your way home by, they could be tents for space-age scout troops or hot-ticket items for the backyard sleepover set.
Beyond suggesting market possibilities, the larva-like shelter subtly makes the point that this is transitional housing-so transitional that it doesn’t allow for any kind of personalization. These walls would collapse if you tried to pin anything on them. But no one on the jury defended makeshift construction or confused personal liberty with decor. Instead, unanimous kudos went to McNall and Seeley for creating an effective advocacy tool, something that no acreage of tent cities, no mass of embarrassing boxes, has been able to do…”
October 18th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
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