Week 6: Stamps design

I started to do some visual tests with stamps, in an attempt to bring back to my website some elements related to the post and letters, kind of introducing a more manual aspect to the website. The idea with these stamps was to use them to communicate about homeless people hobbies or passions, as a way of stimulating the conversation between them and the other members of society, of finding topics to talk about in the letters or points they had in common. Each homeless person would have different stamps on their profile in the website.

After a tutorial with Rebecca on Wednesday morning, I came to the conclusion with her that letters were maybe not the best idea of things that could be exchanged between homeless people and other members of society, and that, for the project to be successful, it would have required people really implicated with it (are people going to continue writing letters after a while? What if they stop, how would the homeless person feel?), but also a complicated logistic (not having a postbox, the exchange becomes difficult and long).

I still wanted to preserve that idea of enhancing communication between homeless people and other members of society, and more importantly, make homeless people feel included in society, getting people closer to homeless people. The idea of a physical exchange was hard to put in place and make it work, so I went for a way of exchanging without a physical exchange. I went back through my research and my experience as a volunteer to see what could be exchanged, or in which way could we help homeless people effectively. I realized that homeless people often need or would deeply appreciate things that we take for granted in our daily life, and that have a small value (in terms of money). This would be a good way of making us participate in an exchange with them, where they would obtain things that would be really useful for them and they can't afford, that we would finance buy economical contributions to the website. These "needs" would be presented in a form of stamps (different for each homeless person depending on their needs), that would be collected by the people donating, and added to a virtual (or physical even) kind of sticker album where they would keep adding new stamps as they donate. There would be new stamps on the website every few days as the homeless people needs will variate, new homeless people with new needs would participate in the initiative, etc...

The good thing is that the economical donation would be really small, as those are basic needs, and people would get to visually see what their money is going for: they know the person (the stories of each homeless people are posted on their profile) and they know exactly what they are donating (object/service). The organization would receive the money from the donations and would buy the objects/services to them hand them out to the homeless person that asked for them.

Here are the stamps I designed, where I included the presence of the hand, which to me is a clear symbol of donation, handing something to someone, to add that physical side to the virtual exchange: