The smart city strategies and the Internet of Things(IoT) have an inevitable impact on individual and social behavior in the context of a city. They have influenced our daily lives and our way of engagement with the city. However, there is a gap between smart city proposals and those experiencing homelessness -the most vulnerable citizens as the users of the public space-.
This project presents Invisible People; a social awareness project that gives its users an ability to engage with the community they live in. It targets to improve the connectivity between people experiencing homelessness and the rest of society. Invisible People provides a crowdsourcing platform for communication that aims to empower society. In particular, it utilizes a responsive digital interface that broadcasts stories put into the system by the homeless population in designated public spaces. Moreover, it is an example of how the use of IoT creates a qualitatively different urban sociality. Personal stories are integral units of social awareness that catalyze this system and encourage empathy and community engagement through innovative and artistic ways. The smart system presented in this article aims to integrate the audience feedback and help as an input to complete the flow by connecting two distant populations.
Invisible People is seeking to highlight its manifesto by synthesizing Awareness, Communication, and Engagement. The design considers a bottom-up approach by considering the city as a social media and promoting the citizens' responsibility, which resembles an exercise of the right to the city.
