makePretty

What if we could modify existing infrastructure to suit the needs of impoverished communities while still maintaining their community impact as gathering spaces?

Problem

A hypothetical look on existing homeless infrastructure in Vancouver. Amplifying the current needs of affordable housing into a speculative homeless design project that critiques the current status quo. In short, how do we suit the needs of impoverished communities while still maintaining current gathering spaces.

Design Process

Our research led us to develop several forms that amplify the existing status quos affordable housing crisis. Whereby the government fails to take care of its most vulnerable citizens. By stipulating the conditions of an “aesthetic” shelter, we can reintegrate the problem of homelessness back into the very fabric of the city, by adopting the guise of a beneficial program that caters to green gentrification, modifying the resulting outcome so that the inoffensiveness of “hiding” a current problem could be more palatable to urban affluent communities.

Variations on speculations, what and how would these carts function in society?.

Critical Speculation

MakePretty seeks to critically examine how we design for marginalized communities by amplifying the existing problems of city infrastructure and planning. As a society we frequently ignore or further marginalize these minorities, by isolating them further through “green” initiatives that beautify but further isolating existing populations of homelessness. Our goal here was to amplify but also obscure the problem by asking viewers to critically question how our cities remain sustainable through rapid growth.

Critical speculation across areas of refuge.

Contribution

In this project I created the assets, slides and cart design, and was a major part of the iteration and design workbook process. This project allowed me to critique exsisting practices by designing an outcome that made people aware of the problem of green gentrification by amplifying the current issues in Vancouver. I was responsible for copywriting, assembling and the final makePretty handbook which can be viewed here.

Final Exploration

Our team wanted to critique the “regreening” of spaces as a rallying call for gentrification, thus we wanted to look at a speculative product that would help the homeless while also oppressing them socially. We looked into spaces where homeless people gathered, and found we could also co-opt the space for a community oriented project as well. By recontextualizing the form the homeless shelters took, we could situate our form as a counterfactual object --- an object that defies what any reasonable person would do as both a way to obscure an existing problem, while promoting a “community - oriented” goal without having to re examine the implications of such a structure in a sustainable city.

You can view the final design workbook here .

final products

Reflection

A project that built upon my existing passion for architecture and city scaled interactions, our team noticed that the project --- much like real world interactions are never truly linear. Looking back, our initial struggle wasn’t so much dealing with forms, but how to present each artefact present. This project showed me speculative design, or rather design in general is never meant to be “just pretty” but rather its a case to show our intentions to how we change public perceptions about the places we work, live and play.