Rebranding the Homeless

Urban Nomad Shelter
First off, note that Cameron McNall and Damon Seeley didn't call their submission a homeless shelter. In name and form, the vivid inflatable contradicts a stereotype of cardboard-box vagrancy. The two partners of the Los Angeles�based Electroland conceived the Urban Nomad Shelter as both a "humanitarian act and as a social provocation." They created a cushion from the ground that also serves as a census taker for an itinerant population that is hard to count and even harder to countenance.

If Electroland's activist agenda captured the jurors' attention, it was their strategy that kept it. McNall, an architect, and Seeley, an artist/designer, have taken one of the most potent forces of the private-sector economy—brand identity—and redeployed it on the street. The Urban Nomad Shelter uses a self-conscious "design culture" aesthetic (think Target or Ikea) to re-brand the homeless and re-map urban real estate. The neon-colored cocoons work like soft pushpins on a city plan, making it impossible not to see the homeless and not to see them as human. As Kennedy put it, "The design makes a complex issue visible with the added virtue of operating on multiple platforms"