Invisible People; An Urban Responsive Digital Interface

By Noushin Radnia, Spring 2017 StudioLab

INVISIBLE PEOPLE is a social awareness project that gives everyone an ability to envision and engage with the community they live, in order to empower the larger society around them.

An access to an open resource for communication. The story is the most important unit of social change and the internet is becoming as a zone for engagement. This vision has emerged from ideas around building platforms for engagement around community to become something wider, which this proposal is seeking to hone and explore. The emergence of urban social media(digital public space) with contribution of citizens.

This project presents Invisible People; a social awareness project that gives its users an ability to engage with the community they live in. It targets to improve the connectivity between people experiencing homelessness -the most vulnerable citizens as the users of the public space- and the rest of the society. Invisible People provides a crowdsourcing platform for communication that aims to empower the society. In particular, it utilizes a responsive digital interface that broadcasts stories put into the system by the homeless population in designated public spaces. Moreover, it is an example of how the use of IoT creates a qualitatively different urban sociality. Personal stories are integral units of social awareness that catalyzes this system and encourages empathy and community engagement through innovative and artistic ways. The smart system presented in this article aims to integrate the audience feedback and help as an input to complete the flow by connecting two distant populations.

Invisible People is seeking to highlight its manifesto by synthesizing Awareness, Communication, and Engagement. The design considers a bottom-up approach by considering the city as a social media and promoting the citizens responsibility, which resembles an exercise of the right to the city.