Dundee International Design Challenge

Current position： > ENGLISH > What's　on > Focus attention >

Release time：2017-01-04 15:56

Homelessness is a wickedly complex problem that, without exception, pervades societies across the globe. As a progressive 21^st century city, and the UK’s first designated UNESCO City of Design, we are launching the inaugural Dundee Design Challenge to help tackle this problem head on.

We are looking for designers to respond to a call to help find a digital design solution to fundamentally improve the lives of those who must deal with homelessness on a daily basis, and consider how digital technology can be used to prevent the issue in the first place. We want you to imagine a digital communication system that can reconnect homeless people with everyday life – with friends and family, with each other, with potential sources of help – food, financial, emotional and practical support.

The system must take into account the fact that homeless people have limited, if any, access to digital technology.

As a UNESCO City of Design, we understand the power of design to improve lives, and solve problems. We want to lead by example and show that design-led solutions can in fact change society, and make our towns and cities equitable places where everyone can live together, with a roof over their head, their basic human rights and dignity in tact.

Design and innovation don’t happen in isolation, they are the result of a shared thought process, a collaborative effort. Dundee is a prime example of the role that networks, collaboration and partnerships play in propelling a city forward. Dialogue is a key part of this design process and core to instigating change for the better. This is augmented by digital technologies enabling dialogue and collaboration both at a hyper-local and international level. Digital social innovations are now taking place around the world, on topics such as open democracy, crowd funding, opening access to data, offering new ways of making products and services. We are looking for an outstanding design-led solution to fundamentally change this complex problem that pervades societies across the globe.

For the first year of the Dundee Design Challenge, we’ve chosen to ask people to use digital technology to examine and find solutions for some of the issues related to homelessness. We do not expect participants to discover ways of building more houses or shelters; instead we want you to look at some of the problems that are associated with not having secure accommodation and propose new ways, using digital technology, that those problems can be solved. Some of these issues are listed below, but there are many others which could provide the focus for the challenge. You can propose to use any sort of digital technology, keeping in mind that access to the internet is severely limited for some people.

Additionally, we want you to look at the issues around prevention of homelessness – how can technology help people before they lose the roof over their heads?

We want innovative designers to come up with new ideas. From using public spaces, to apps, from new technology to reimagining old technology – and anything in between that can help people without a home to live their lives. Homelessness isn’t just a problem in Dundee, it’s an issue across the world. We want to help designers and developers to start to find solutions.

We want designers and developers to send us a breakdown of an idea that can help people who are homeless or in danger of becoming so.
The Challenge is open to anybody working in, or with, a UNESCO City of Design.

That may be of interest to the article