Simone's friends
Interact beyond social borders
Simone's friends connect people who are passionate about justice.
Justice is an essentially important value for an incredible number of people. Meanwhile, in times of professionalisation of markets as well as individualisation of community and privat life, it is not always easy to remain in solidarity.
1. The idea behind the idea
Our motivation
We live in a society that varies greatly in terms of social and material participation. When people leave equalization of opportunities and crisis intervention exclusively to professional organizations, it has both advantages and disadvantages. Among the disadvantages is that social barriers are cemented in this way. In a way, we even accept exclusion, reducing daily interactions with people who may need our help. This has two unfavorable effects: we unlearn solidarity in everyday life and, on the other hand, we feel powerless in view of social problems.
Why did we choose homelessness as our primary example
Health issues and different life experience results in extreme barriers to interaction. Our question was, how solidarity can be facilitated beyond the boundaries of one's own social class.
Between paternalism and lack of empathy
Homelessness is a structural, general challenge: society "owes" marginalized people security, understanding, perspectives, open paths, recognition and respect. Nonetheless, help can also be based on what people specifically need or want on a particular day in a particular situation.
Life on the street takes up an incredible amount of resources, is harmful to one's health, while at the same time many opportunities are no longer available. These disadvantages also result in barriers for interaction.
2. Research: overcoming borders
We asked a certain number of people if and how they interact with presumed homeless people, and how they think they can be helpful. We asked about their reservations, difficulties and experiences. We asked them whether they consider themselves socially committed, whether they have already been involved in projects for homeless or spontaneously provided support, and what reservations they had. Finally we asked them whether they would like to participate in a support network via an app.
The majority of those who completed the questionnaire consider themselves socially engaged, have already provided some kind of support a few times, would continue to do so sporadically, and are open to using the app.
Since the idea is to synergize different behaviors, we decided to work with two user personas:
On the one hand, "Simone" is socially engaged and already brings along some knowledge and experience. "Georg" is less involved, but as a high-earning single male he has a lot of resources at his disposal that he can contribute.
The last thing we did was to collect topics, problems and functions that could be useful for social engagement.
3. Main functions
Search for institutions, actions, offers, appeals and requests
Contribute to the network
Share your knowledge
Stay on top of your goals
6. Search - Prototype
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