This project emerges from the prompts given in the Design Issues course under the instruction of Phil Otto. Professor Otto asked students to select and understand an audience, explore the audience’s burdens, and connect with the audience’s philosophies and principles.
Initially, the designer picked “boondockers,” people who live in vehicles from free parking spaces, after “free camping” across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a week during the summer before the fall 2020 semester. The project consisted of a comprehensive literature review, digital ethnography with boondockers through participation in online platforms, and several ideations applying user-centered design methods for evaluation.
Audience research presentation slides
For visitors unfamiliar with boondocking, you've probably heard about #VanLife. Vanlife and the proliferation of vehicle dwelling in the United States is the canary in the coal mine of late capitalism and a desperate need for lower housing prices. [1] Despite the more significant societal problems, influencers and marketers put cosmetics on the dead canary, call it minimalism, and extract maximum value from the conditions. [2] Nowhere can the phenomena be seen so obviously as the disparity between the safe sleeping parking lots run by religious organizations for gig workers [3] and lux venture-backed parking lots directed toward wealthy remote workers. [4]
Framing a solution space slides
The research and design process informed the designer that the appropriate audience wasn’t boondockers, after all, but people who pay monthly rent and mortgages. It’s these people whose lifestyles are threatened by societal strains and bad habits.
Ideation process results
The designer decided to develop a fictitious near-future government organization that lobbies for and serves people who are starting an auto-mobile life in America. Through brand identity and messaging on social media, the designer conveys a possible future where more numerous people will call their vehicles home. Accomplishing this task isn’t very difficult because, as William Gibson once said, the future is already here–it’s just not equally distributed. Following Gibson’s insight, the designer curates images and words from today or the recent past, using an aesthetic of “bureaucratic minimalism,” to communicate a world of auto-mobile housing with state intervention. The goal is to highlight the canary, as mentioned above, and evoke viewers to consider whether they desire this future.
Brand identity framework, narrative and guidelines.
Instagram account and posts.
An online questionnaire, inspired by Cat Bluemke’s guerrilla futures intervention We Can Assist, sits at the heart of this project.[6] By immersing themselves in the project content and completing the questionnaire, the audience begins to imagine whether automobile-housing is a good fit for them and others. The questionnaire’s content makes it evident that living from a vehicle is a lot more austere than it appears on YouTube and Instagram, and it’s far from a weekend camping trip. When a participant realizes the lifestyle is not ideal or sustainable, they are pointed toward the values of the vandwellers as alluded to above and asked how they might bring the principles home to their community today.
Home Page, Survey, Project Background, and Resource Page.
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There are many further steps that the designer could take to expand upon the work of this project. The easiest next step is to invest in ads to promote the fictitious brand, driving people to the questionnaire. Further scholarly research is necessary to articulate better the values of the vandwellers mentioned above. That research could take the form of participatory design workshops or autoethnographic exercises. Future study results could be brought closer to the public via an immersive exhibition in a contemporary art museum or local library instead of getting lost in social media's noise. Finally, the designer sees room for research into the techniques marketers and influencers use to extract value from social dilemmas, enabling their customers to collaborate with them in furthering societal inequalities.
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About the Designer
D.J. Trischler is a communication designer, an educator, and a graduate student in the Master of the Design program at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. He and his wife Megan happily own a cape cod style house in Cincinnati’s East Price Hill neighborhood. They both like to “boondock” and hike as much as possible throughout the United State’s Midwest and Southern regions.
The designer would like to thank the Cheap RV Living online forum, Vandwellers Facebook group, Dr. Emily Hill, Nova Ostermann, Akshat Srivastava, Brayton Deal, Claypole and Lehman neighbors, and the 2020 Design Issues cohort for their insights and feedback they shared throughout the design process.
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Sources
[1] Nomadland
[2] The Longing for Less
[3] Southen California churches, temples open their parking lots
[4] What if your home could be mobile, but also you could park it?
[2] The Longing for Less
[3] Southen California churches, temples open their parking lots
[4] What if your home could be mobile, but also you could park it?
