Patchworks:citizen-led innovation for chaotic lives

Southern, Jen and Dillon, Rod and Potts, Rob and Morrell, Daniel and Ferrario, Maria Angela and Simm, William and Ellis, Rebecca and Whittle, Jon (2013) Patchworks:citizen-led innovation for chaotic lives. In: CHI EA '13 CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, pp. 2871-2872. ISBN 9781450319522

Abstract

#Patchworks is a citizen-led co-design project to design innovative technologies for and with homeless people in the North West of England. The project involved 3 quite distinct communities: Signposts, a community resource centre that works with homeless people in Morecambe; Madlab, a community of DIY hackers and creative technologists in Manchester; and an interdisciplinary community of academics from bio-medicine, computing, art-design, anthropology and management science from Lancaster University, as part of the Catalyst project (www.catalystproject.org.uk). This video was made to communicate the Patchworks research to a wider public audience. It shows how through a series of practical electronics workshops and discussions the co-design team developed a prototype to help homeless people, whose lives are often characterised as 'chaotic', to access important appointments.