HANGING BY A THREAD
2023 ∙ TU/e Industrial Design ∙ Final Master Project ∙ Homelessness ∙ Empathy ∙ aquí ∙ Barcelona
2023 ∙ TU/e Industrial Design ∙ Final Master Project ∙ Homelessness ∙ Empathy ∙ aquí ∙ Barcelona
For my final master project I went to Barcelona, Spain, to work on a project about homelessness and hostile architecture. This project was executed in collaboration with aquí, an urban design studio based in Barcelona.
During the ideation phase, I explored three possible design directions. After the ideation phase I continued working on two concepts. This resulted in a pentagonal swing representing five categories of support that hold us up and prevent us from ending up on the street. The goal of this swing is offering a tangible experience that informs people about homelessness and provokes empathy towards those experiencing it. By unhooking the supports we can simulate what it's like to lose them. As long as we don’t lose multiple supports at the same time, we're okay, the remaining threads will carry us. However, when we lose multiple supports simultaneously, we fall.
From literature I chose on the following five supports: health, relationship, housing, employment, and family. I chose these categories, which relate to relational, structural, and personal factors because for all specific trigger moments can be imagined.
A total of ten people were interviewed to validate the swing. Many of the participants remarked the swing to be comfortable and fun. Many participants felt the unhooking of the threads to be quite shocking, and mentioned that the physical experience of unhooking the threads helped to get the message across. Some remarked that they were already aware of how people end up on the street but said the design served as a good reminder. Half of the participants indicated that the experience influenced their views on homelessness.
