Chance4Change

Homelessness can be incredibly dehumanizing, with a wall of fear, disgust, and misunderstanding separating our homeless from the rest of society. In order to draw attention of our lack of empathy for the homeless condition and raise awareness of the adversities that the homeless population faces on a daily basis, we created a protest piece - a slot machine that puts users in the shoes of a homeless person.

Critical Making, UC Berkeley Graduate Course

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The Process

Design Research

We started with observational research - standing on sidewalks around the Bay and watching the interactions between homeless people and passers by (or lack thereof). 95% of people walked right past without so much as looking in the direction of the homeless person sitting several feet from them. We talked to several homeless people and heard an incredible diversity of stories - veterans who had fought on the front lines, parents who had kids scattered across the country, people who were doing their best to survive. We also talked to “regular” people to hear what they thought of homelessness in the Bay, and that's where there seemed to be a fundamental disconnect between the homeless reality and the way city residents perceived it. It’s hard to empathize with someone when you don’t understand what they’re living day in and day out.

This inspired us to narrow our focus from the broad issue of homelessness to
society’s lack of understanding of the homeless reality.

Our next step was to investigate past protests to get inspired. We looked at more “traditional” protests big and small - from tent cities in front of city hall, to marches, to sidewalk chalking. But we also looked at more creative forms of protest - from an artist that set up small apartments in manholes to humanize the homeless condition to the French climate change protests where thousands of people left their shoes in front of city hall when they were forbidden from marching.

“Education is the first step to change!” - Milo Trauss (community organizer)

This, combined with insights we got from expert interviews with community organizers, brought us to our three key three design principles for our provocation:

Surprise: Using the element of unexpectedness to draw people in - especially
those who would be least drawn to the topic normally.
Educate: Bringing people new knowledge about homelessness to take away and
think about instead of just give them an installation to observe.
Humanize: We weren’t aiming to solve homelessness with this one piece - rather,
we wanted to remind people that these were human beings not so different from you and I.

Brainstorming and Fabrication

Before settling on a slot machine form factor, we brainstormed other ways of commenting on our lack of empathy for the homeless population. We thought of motifs and images surrounding homelessness, such as tents, sleeping bags, and cups for collecting change. One aspect of homelessness that stood out to us was the insufficiency and inaccessibility of everyday resources and necessities, leading to a range of concepts - from an exhibit in which necessities such as food or a toothbrush are displayed as “important” objects to a vending machine in which necessities are priced exorbitantly to reflect the how difficult it can be to obtain these necessities.

Sketching and Rendering

Fabrication

The body and lever mechanism of the slot machine were first modelled in Fusion360, then transferred to Adobe Illustrator for laser cutting. We utilized a combination of materials and off-the-shelf parts for the body mechanism. The body was mostly composed of ¼” wood for structural purposes and either painted or covered with stickers to provide a finished-product feel. The wooden parts were accommodated by clear and colored acrylic panels, which were located in areas in which there is interface with the user.

We utilized a Featherboard in combination with Neopixels and a soundboard to integrate light and sound into the Chance4Change experience. We tested several methods of light diffusion for the interface icons and decided to use a combination foam and construction paper supplemented by a frosted acrylic cover. Despite facing challenges with programming of the Featherboard and broken soldered joints, we assembled the prototype successfully and tested it out with students in the field.

The Final Design

Observations

We set up our slot machine in Berkeley and watched about 10 different people interact with it “in the wild”. We were happy to see that the installation resonated with a lot of people:

“It makes me think how privileged I am. There are all these resources around us and yet so many people have so little. I'm fasting for Syria right now and yet right beside me there are people in need and I'm completely oblivious.” - Player 1

“I never thought about it that way. It’s a pretty frightening reality...I had no idea.”
- Player 2

We also heard push-back from a few people:

“It’s life...If I were homeless I would deal with it. Just like I deal with what I have to deal with now.”
- Player 3

We learned some lessons about what worked and what didn’t:

The red lights were effective at creating a feeling of “yikes”
in players (conveyed a lack of control)
The artifact was impactful - people really liked being able to
take something away with them to look at later
For some people, it was still hard to empathize with the
homeless - the machine didn’t bridge the gap for them
The installation needed a lot of explanation for people to know
how they were supposed to interact with it
The “Insert coin” element was interpreted as a request for
money and made some people less eager to play

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