Chosen subject: homeless people and their relation to society and local communities

Homeless people often lack of social interaction, and see themselves pulled away from society and local communities to which they belonged before, getting to the point where their relations and interactions with society are almost inexistent. How can graphic design, and more precisely social design, get to re-etablish those links between homeless people and ourselves?

A group of volunteers from Cooperación Internacional in their route around Madrid city center (ONG'S website)

Social issues and sociology are two things I'm really interested in, society being something so complex, with so much different mechanisms and hidden rules, that I find it a subject with endless possibilities with which starting a project. In my work, the social aspect of things is very recurrent, as I find that design should be a tool to change or improve the world we live in and our society, and to help those who can benefit from our work, which is something I've been doing during the last few years, volunteering at food banks as well as with homeless people, and that I really enjoy.

As I said, this interest in homeless people comes from volunteering with them during last year in Madrid, with the ONG "Cooperación Internacional". Every Sunday morning, we would go to Madrid's city center as a group of volunteers, where most of the homeless people are concentrated, and do a route around various streets, offering breakfast (coffee, pastries, juice, etc...) to them, as an "excuse" or a way to then get to talk with them, a way to start a conversation. For them , we wanted to be persons they could talk to, persons that would listen to them, to which they could tell their stories, and that they knew where going to be there every Sunday. During that year of volunteering, I got to know lots of insights and aspects of homeless that I didn't know about before, and that made me even more interested in the subject, and willing to find solutions for it.

I remember that just before starting the volunteering experience, the woman from the ONG told me that the biggest problem homeless people faced was how removed they feel from society. Thinking about it, it is true: I have never seen someone talking to a homeless person on the street just because they were willing to do it, and we even tend not to get to close to the, because it is in the collective imaginary that homeless people are dangerous, or that they are often crazy. When we see a homeless people, one of the first we think is that we do not want to end up like them, and we are terrified of imagining ourselves in that situation. Even my parents, before starting the volunteering, told me to be careful, and seemed a bit worried that I was actually going to interact with homeless people. It is that fear and distance society have over homeless people what leads them to be rejected of society, pushed to a side, as individuals society wish weren't existing. Being homeless, these people end up with no one to talk to, no one who cares about them, and that feeling of not being useful for society is one of their biggest issues, much more than how cold or hungry they can feel in the street.

Graphic representation showing the evolution of homeless people in England

In England we count 5000 homeless people (rough sleeping), this number referring to the number of people who sleeps in the street on a daily basis, but the number would rise up to 32 000, if we count people who sleep in shelters, friends and family houses, or in B&B's because they are homeless. This is the equivalent to 1 homeless person for every 201 persons. If we take the example of Kingston (easier to make ourselves an idea of the percentage of homeless people), we count a total of 2048 homeless people in the borough, with 27 rough sleepers. This numbers are nevertheless really approximate as it is extremely difficult to count and document the number of homeless people, due to their mobility and the fact that lots of them don't turn up to social services.

Becoming homeless often results of a tragic event in the life of those people, something unexpected that brings them tragically and suddenly to that situation, as: the loss of a family member they depended upon, the loss of their job, undergoing difficult illnesses like strokes, or the addiction to drugs or alcohol, which often comes together with an estrangement between them and their family members. All this health problems just become worse when those people end up in the street, due to0 the lack of ressources.

Data showing how homelessness can be a risk factor for employment and health (source: homeless.org.uk)

Being homeless involves without any doubts, a major break from society, a disconnection from it, which can for example be explained by the employment situation of many homeless people, who are unemployed and find it impossible to get a job. Nevertheless, having a job plays an essential role in our inclusion in society, as first of all, it is a way to get to know new people, and form social relations with them, but secondarily and most importantly, it makes you feel useful for society, and fulfills yourself. Having a job allows you to show that you've got something with what to contribute to society, that you've got a range of skills with which you're capable of producing something.

Although we all already know that being homeless implies the fact of being lonely, and that most of them spend their time alone on the street, we could also think that there is a kind of community between the homeless people themselves. But this is sadly not true, as it is really hard for homeless people to get to build relationships with other homeless people, mainly due to the fact that mobility is an important part of homeless people "lifestyle", with lots of them that keep moving, both inside the city (because they are forced to move by local authorities, because of the concentration of people in some areas at some times of the day etc...) and in between cities, this being due to the fact that even if being homeless, they keep trying to find a job, and tend to move to cities with more jobs opportunities (in Spain for example, lots of homeless people form Madrid which is in the center of the country, will move to cities in the coast for summer, where people go, as they are more likely to find small and precarious jobs, with which to earn some money). This movements make it really hard to build a sense of community in between homeless, reinforcing the loneliness and the distance from society homeless people face.

Having got to know and hear all of this from the homeless people themselves, I really want to explore in which ways can graphic design help to re-build those relations between society and homeless people and how can it become a tool to integrate homeless people in today's society and the local communities they once belonged to.

When thinking of a starting point through which starting my research, the fact of homeless people having a "non fixed address" seems to me really interesting. What does the fact of not having a fixed address means, in terms of employability for example, is it then possible or easy to get a job? How does that translate in terms of official documents, the address that is normally written in your ID, or even legally: is that a problem to have a "non fixed address"? On that same idea, after watching a VICE documentary about hidden homelessness in California, I got really interested in that other aspect of homelessness: are they even taken into account in the official numbers of homelessness? What differentiates them from rough sleepers, have they got the same issues? I know this is also an existent problem in Ibiza (Spain) during the summer, when people from other parts of Spain go to the island to work, but can't stay anywhere due to the extremely high prices of accommodation in the island, which makes them have to sleep in their cars, in waste grounds, etc...

The fact of not having a fixed address and seeing how does that affect individuals and their relations to society or the government seems to me an interesting point from where to start researching, to then get to know more about homeless people and their issues.