What do you see when you See a homeless person
can i ask you all to close your eyes for
a minute
picture someone living homeless
what do you see you can open them again
in my work as a design researcher
i use design thinking tools to help
people to see
i teach design research here at emily
carr
here’s what i know design research
is about three things curiosity
compassion and collaboration
having curiosity developing compassion
and using collaborative tools to help
people
to solve problems themselves
research begins with curiosity
i myself am annoyingly curious about
everything
you have to be to be a researcher it’s
all about the question
design research can help people
to become more curious about the
possible
my own curiosity led me to ask the
question
how might we shift or change
the way people see those experiencing
homelessness
in completing my masters last year at
sfu
i worked in my own community
i wanted to know why people were so
uncomfortable
with homelessness some people seem to be
afraid
some people don’t really know how to say
hello
and still others really want to help but
don’t know how
i’m wondering if we can break those
walls down
i’m wondering if we can create more
compassion
while still respecting even honoring
our frustrations
i started my work with a survey of over
130 people
just to get a sense of the mood out
there
when i asked people what they thought of
the new supportive housing coming to our
community
i got a range of answers from hate it
it will allow drug addicts a safe place
to use drugs and store stolen property
all the way to these are human beings
i find it appalling that anyone can be
against it
following that survey i conducted three
community workshops
with people from very different
backgrounds people experiencing
homelessness
people who lived in the surrounding
neighborhood people who support those
living with homelessness
as well as local politicians and
businesses
and i ask them to collaborate in mixed
groups
homeless with housed addicts with
politicians
i used three different design thinking
tools in my workshops
the first was a quick cursory education
i put posters all around the walls with
quotes from the survey
it gave people an idea of the variation
in
in thinking in the community
it got people’s juices going it got them
thinking
and i invited them to comment on post-it
notes
the next tool i used was empathy maps
this is where compassion comes into play
these are big sheets of paper with what
we call a persona in the middle
high school students people experiencing
homelessness
elderly people in the neighborhood
businesses
and around that center were four
quadrants
what do they see what do they hear
what do they think and feel and what do
they say and do
and i asked people to work in groups of
three to five at a table
to fill in the quadrants they chatted
while they did that
this was really collaboration at work
the final tool and the most powerful was
the storytelling
posters i gave each table again
a big sheet of cardboard and a variety
of materials
fabric ribbons scissors glue
magazines and i asked them
to tell a story of how things could be
better in our community
the last thing i asked them to do was to
explain this work to the rest of the
room
i asked them to tell us what they did
why they did it
and what it all meant
this is really collaboration at work
now i kind of thought that this was
going to come up with some kind of
magical solution to how we can change
the way people see homelessness
but what i got was evidence evidence
that people could work together
that they were proud of their solutions
and they owned them
they had things in common they talked
about their hobbies
they talked about their children and
their grandchildren
these exercises had brought people
together and created a sense of
community
well that’s great but what am i going to
do with all of this
well my next project is to ask people
who have lived with homelessness
to guide and lead students and teachers
to create a learning tool to help those
students better understand
the humanity behind poverty and
homelessness
and i hope to use that tool all across
canada
to create a more informed and
compassionate group of voters
we need to do this work and we need
curiosity compassion and collaboration
to do that
i attended a conference hosted by the
othering a belonging institute at uc
berkeley last year
it was so exciting for someone who’s a
design thinker
and something really stuck with me it
was this
zulu word sauerbona
it means i see you
i’m hoping that design thinking will
help us all to be seen
close your eyes what do you see