Chuck had agreed to tell me his story. He was a homeless man in his midforties. He stood at about 5 feet 8 inches tall, and from what I could tell, he was a very assertive fellow. It was a sweltering day in July. I dragged my camera equipment along and quickly tried to locate a shaded area where I could have the ambiance of city noise without too many distractions. My assistant, Cori, was going to be asking the questions.1 We found an alley with neutral colors that harmonized well with Chuck’s skin tone. I set up my camera and hit the record button. Cori proceeded to ask Chuck about how he became homeless. These were his opening words:
On June 17, I found out that I have terminal cancer. I didn’t want my wife and kids to see me die, so I made a choice to be homeless. I gave everything to my family, and I rolled out. I came back to the West Virginia area to say my final goodbyes to everybody. The doctors told me last Friday that I have less than a year. I’m at peace with the Lord, and I’m at peace with myself. Nobody’s going to change my mind; I have no reason to change my mind. I won’t live to see 49, and I’m content with that.
Chuck’s words speak of some of the complexities of homelessness. His story is part of a website design project I created called Face of Homelessness. It catalogs the stories of homeless people living in Morgantown, West Virginia. My story is that I’m a graphic designer, a former advertising art director, and a former video editor. I spent most of my formative years in Ghana, West Africa, and moved to the US in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree in graphic design.
When I first arrived, I was fascinated by the efficiency of the US system, compared to that of many developing countries. Everything seemed to work well, and I encountered lots of friendly and hardworking people, but I also saw broken elements in the society. The evening news was saturated with crime reports, and the ads for pharmaceutical companies made me feel sick with their ramblings of side effects, many of them taking up the greater percentage of the ad duration. These two worlds seemed disparate, and I found that interesting—ironic, even. A few months into my stay, I volunteered in a meals program for homeless people and wondered why that problem existed in such a fine society. Was I naive? Probably. But my naivety compelled me to greater curiosity.
CREATING EMPATHY
Social issues like homelessness are complex. The emotions surrounding it range from concern to apathy. Add to this the fact that there are people who have had truly negative experiences with the homeless population as well as those who propagate frightening imaginary scenarios. It results in a social paralysis; we are overcome with a feeling of helplessness. Could it be that the issue is too big to comprehend? Perhaps. People are less likely to act positively on issues they find personally intimidating. The situation is made even worse when they don’t see themselves as affected by the problem. Vicarious suffering is not an occupation that most people would gladly embrace. We need empathy. In IDEO’s Human Centered Design Field Guide, empathy is explained as follows: “Empathy is the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their perspectives.”2 IDEO is describing a way for designers to better understand the people they are designing for. It places the designer as the subject, the one who does the empathizing, but couldn’t the same thing be done for an audience to help them understand the lives of other people better? Would that be a compelling outcome for a design project? The nuance here is worth emphasizing. I’m not describing design as a means of conventional creative problem solving. I’m describing design as the lens through which we can better explain social issues like homelessness. I speak of design that can primarily serve the purpose of elucidating a problem rather than interpreting it. I will now turn to how this can be achieved.
STORYTELLING IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING
Storytelling is intrinsic to the design process. For decades, designers have employed personas, scenarios, and the like to bring clarity and understanding to the team working on the project. Designing for social change is no different; the stories are necessary to drive community buy-in and understanding.
When I first started researching homelessness in the United States, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the data. There was a lot of information without any proper context. Who are these people? Why are they homeless? What are they doing about it? These are questions that cannot be answered with statistics. A search for the term homelessness on the Internet is likely to bring up an image of a person holding up a cardboard sign. Could this be a true representation of what many people think? Ask anyone that you meet about homelessness and you are bound to get a lot of strong opinions. I know of no other issue where people seem to have more resolved convictions than homelessness. Homeless people are “dirty,” “crazy,” “poor,” “lonely,” etc. These were some of the answers I got when I inquired about it.3 I find these answers unsatisfactory. At best, they are presumptuous. To build on falsehood or presumption is to risk contributing to the problem rather than helping to resolve it.
Most of the homeless people I interviewed in Morgantown, West Virginia, had experienced rather unfortunate predicaments. Chuck was terminally ill with cancer; he had been homeless since he was eighteen. Edward was wrongfully convicted of a crime, which led him to serve twenty-one years in prison. Bartley had type 2 diabetes and ended up in the hospital multiple times because he couldn’t get his insulin refrigerated. You would expect that these circumstances would make them dispirited, but, rather, what I saw on their faces was hope. They had big ambitions and ideas about overcoming homelessness. But there was also the occasional person who had chosen homelessness as an alternative lifestyle. The problems are vast, and the reasons for homelessness are nuanced, but no two stories are the same. This complexity poses a significant issue for any researcher because there are few (if any) common threads with regards to why people are homeless. I posit that ending homelessness and removing the stigma associated with it will require us to tell the stories of affected individuals to the stakeholders, organizations, and the entire community. Homelessness as a concept needs to be unpacked and humanized. In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath write, “A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from the abstract prose.”4 I found it revealing that many of my interviewees expressed frustration about the negative perceptions and generalizations of the homeless. They wanted people to hear their stories. Stories create emotional understanding, a necessary precondition if effective solutions are to be realized.
The stories from the Face of Homelessness project are serious but conversational. There are jokes, tears, and frustration. The interviewees responded to questions like “What can you do to change the homelessness situation?” and “What is your favorite dish to make?” The aesthetic decisions play to the tenor of the story without compromising its integrity.
A STORY WITHOUT AN ENDING
One of the difficulties with designing for social change is knowing when to call it done. I believe it is a false presupposition to think that design projects of any sort can truly be done. Challenges are bound to arise that may call for a reexamination of the problem, and new approaches will have to be tested as our understanding of the problem grows, and the landscape of design changes. The Face of Homelessness project exists to revive interest in an otherwise tired social issue by adding context to the discussion. The audience is left to interpret the message and draw their own conclusion. During the website’s user testing, one user remarked (just a few minutes into the story) that the interviewee was probably a drug addict and went on to make several cynical comments about homeless people. Another user found the stories very moving, wanted to help, and complained when she’d found no donate or volunteer buttons on the website. I am satisfied with both interpretations. It proves that the audience is not passive but is actively engaged. It is a better outcome than telling them how to think about the issue. Our role as designers should not be relegated to conventional problem solving, whereby design becomes the Band-Aid for our social or marketing issues. I find that particular understanding of design to be somewhat limiting.5 Design is also good for an accurate and engaging presentation of the problem. It should promote dialogue, and we should be content if that were the only outcome.
Stories from the project can be heard and read at faceofhomelessness.com
[1] Cori Mayhew was a graphic design student at West Virginia University and a resident of Morgantown, West Virginia. This project inspired her to work on a homelessness campaign for a local organization.
[2] IDEO.org, The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, 2015, 22, PDF ebook.
[3] My MFA thesis used homelessness as a case study. I surveyed about twenty-five college students at West Virginia University and asked them to describe a homeless person in their own words. See “Using Empathy in Design to Foster Interest in Social Issues” (MFA thesis, West Virginia University, 2013), http://search.proquest.com/docview/1418493569.
[4] Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick (New York: Random House, 2007), 214.
[5] See also Rob Peart, “Why Design is Not Problem Solving + Design Thinking Isn’t Always the Answer.” AIGA Eye on Design (January 2017).