Homefullness

'Homefullness' was one of eight finalists in the RMIT Design Research Institute's Design Challenge 2011: Homelessness. Projects were judged by an international peer review panel of academic and industry experts against the criteria of Design Innovation, Impact, Practicality, Application, Team transdisciplinarity and Design Development. The aim of the Homefullness project exhibited at Federation Square, Melbourne was to use art and design to provoke discussion about homelessness and housing stress and to suggest enabling strategies to move to a future of homefullness or full housing for all. The project used signifiers of political campaigns, (a manifesto, posters, slogans and graphic design narratives on t-towels) to link housing (un)affordabiilty, housing stress and homelessness as key issues which prevent a culture of homefullness. The project is informed by socially engaged art and design projects such as Martha Rosler's 1989 art project at the Dia Foundation, 'If you lived here' which included an exhibition, book and public meeting to investigate perceptions of housing in NYC, the socailly engaged Zurich/Caracas design and architecture based studio, urban-think tank, and work by artists Alex Danko and Howard Arkley which explores Australian housing. The Homefullness manifesto (presented as a poster and on t-towels) provides glimpses of provisional futures which serve as disjunctive and generative provocations. For this project, the tools of art & design conceptualisation became the tools of communication and mobilisation. Homefullness provides new knowledge on how creative interventions can be designed and presented to encourage governments and communities to respond to housing crises in urban centres such as Melbourne and Stockholm and move towards eradicating homelessness and ensuring housing for all. Keely Macarow and Neal Haslem presented papers on the project at Fargfabriken, Stocholm's leading art & architecture gallery, 7 Dec 2012.