Belongings Matter Website
Client
Year
The Public worked with Alexandra Flynn, Associate Professor at Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia to design a website for a report she co-authored, Possessions of Precariously Housed People.
The report compiles and analyses the laws and regulations that govern people and their belongings in regions of Canada, with an emphasis on how law contributes to the marginalization of unhoused and precariously housed people.
The Need
The co-authors approached us to design and develop a website for this report. Our goals were to:
- re-center personhood and re-humanize precariously housed people;
- draw connections between the experiences of precariously housed people, to connect these experiences to regulatory/environmental and systemic processes and frameworks;
- build capacity around the regulatory landscape and equip people to better advocate and mobilize; and
- call attention to an injustice many might not notice otherwise; to bring belongings into the conversation.
The Idea
Belongings matter
This creative framework centres the concept that belongings have physical and emotional significance for precariously housed people. Belongings are important to their survival, and can affirm individual identity and autonomy. Furthermore when precariously housed people are dispossessed of their belongings—they don’t just disappear—they go somewhere. These belongings become a part of the often hidden and layered social fabric of bylaws and structural barriers. From this concept we focused on designing a website which visually and structurally mirrored this process of dispossession, highlighting both the personal significance of belongings, and where they go once displaced.
The Work
Each section of the report focuses on a specific urban environment (i.e. Streets, Parks, Rental Housing, Non-Tenancy Accommodations), and opens with a header illustration representing the environment, with spot illustrations of individual belongings sprinkled throughout, scattered in a way that reflects the content of the report itself (belongings being displaced). Illustrated vignettes also highlight the significance of belongings (and belonging) as told through first-hand experiences. And at the bottom of each section, the possessions are collect together, layered like sediment.
To learn more, visit the website at belongingsmatter.ca
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