t-shirts and homelessness

[shay launder]

hi everyone,

first, t-shirts.
that's great that your gang is interested in t-shirts. perhaps anyone (not just Rui's friends, but anyone in AFH or beyond) who wants to provide their own t-shirt for printing on should bring them to the next meeting and i will organise the printing of them.
this time i will assert much more design control over the way the screens are used with the existing t-shirts as i feel that the printer lost opportunities last time.
hopefully the screen still exists. costs are about $5 per t-shirt.

cool. see you all then.


in repsonse to Rui's posting.

nice work with harnessing great energy for projects.
and now i get all reflective on you because its six in the morning. please stop reading now if you are a busy person:
also, i think we need to be careful not to offer 'the homeless' or 'homeless people' our patronising care. below i am pasting an architectural response to desires voiced in sydney.
to design for people living on the streets or in basements or wherever, we need to be in close contact with people who understand this community, if not the community itself (actually, is it useful to think of homeless people as a 'community' anyway?, with all of the gestures to homogeneity that implies to one unifying factor across a whole lot of diverse individuals), and respond to needs. otherwise we run the risk of making the same mistake that many good intentioned aid and development programmes have made.

i used to lecture in design and students always wanted to make work for 'prostitutes'. when i asked them if they had ever talked to a sex worker in their life, they invariably turned sheepish and replied 'no'.
i, too, give a fuck about the sex industry (and have taken the time to learn a thing or two about it), but we just need to make sure that we are rigorous in our thinking.

anyhow....

The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library

20/12/2007
The Book Show visits a mobile library which caters to the homeless people of Sydney. For most people, the word 'library' conjures a quiet, indoor space, filled with books organised meticulously along Dewey decimal lines. A place to borrow books - as long as you hand over details of your identity, and a promise to bring them back. But imagine a library which inverts all that: a noisy, outdoor affair where the books are different every time you visit, where no one wants to know your last name, and you're allowed to take books away, and never bring them back. The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library in Sydney is all that -- it's a mobile library that looks after the reading needs of the city's homeless people.