What If... Research

To start this project, everyone had to pick theme that their 100 collected photographs followed and that they would be interested in taking in to the next project as a starting point. My theme was 'Night time close ups'.

We were then put into groups of about 5 people who had similar themes of their photographs or their themes could be linked easily.

My group included Sai, Meryem, Gemma, Nick and hazel.

Together our themes were:

Contrasting Colours

Documenting Change

The City

Night Time Close Ups

Changing seasons

Things that shine bright in the night

The first half of this brief was primarily a research project. We were told to find a topic that affected the general public of leeds in some noticeable way and do as much primary and secondary research as possible to make sure that we had enough material to use on the next stage of the brief.

We got together as a group and decided that the best way to approach the brief would be to start with individual research into things that affect leeds and the public and then get back together and discuss the ideas that we had. We would then decide on a final topic that was interesting and important enough to focus on and continue to research that. The idea behind this approach was that we would get a wide variety of issues to start with to give us the best head start.

Although we were going for the first time to do the initial research, we had talked about possibly focussing the problem on graffiti in Leeds and possibly some way of communicating the difference between graffiti and vandalism.

I focussed mainly on researching the graffiti idea. I actually found some really interesting information, and some of it was really recent and so it was pretty relevant. There was a story for just a few days earlier where a man was arrested for tagging on the street with a thick marker pen. This was a really relevant story because it was so recent and it also referred to the tagging and vandalism and graffiti. Graffiti artists obviously do not do tis kind of graffiti but rather see it as an art and create large aesthetically pleasing and colo

urful works of art. This is the message that we would be trying to explain and help people understand the difference between graffiti ad vandalism and try to get rid of the negative connotations of the word 'graffiti'.

There was also a story from a few years ago about a graffiti artist in leeds who actually cleaned dirty walls in the street in certain areas leaving a much lighter mark on the dark dirty wall and using the clean space to create his graffiti. This was a really interesting story and was quite relevant because it was almost beating the negative view of graffiti by creating in an undeniably positive way.

There were a few other stories about graffiti in or around Leeds but they were either not that relevant or not that interesting. Although this research was really interesting to hear about, I discovered that it wasn't really a big problem in Leeds at all and in fact it did not affect the public very much. I realised that graffiti was not a big enough problem to focus on and that we would have to find another problem.

When we got back together as a group then we discussed all the research that we had found and what problems we had researched. A few of us had done our own research into graffiti and all came up with the same conclusion that it wasn't a big enough problem. A different idea was to focus on public transport and how the winter affects it. This is a big issu

e as thousands of people are affected by it every year when rain, wet leaves, wind and ice can bring public transport and roads to a halt. We all have had experience in how the weather affects public transport and causes literally hours of delay.

Another really interesting problem was that of homelessness. This was really relevant to our themes because it tied in well with 'Changing seasons' and 'the city' and could be really interesting with 'night time close ups' and 'contrasting colours'.

Again, all our personal experiences already told us that homelessness is actually a big problem in Leeds. Everyone in the group had seen several homeless people since we had moved to leeds and it was quite a shock to see how many there were to some people from towns and cities where the problem is not as severe at all. I personally found it surprising how many homeless people I would see on a daily basis compared to at home.

We found this problem to be really interesting and far more important than the issue of public transport. I think that this is because of the relation to humanity which public transport doesn't carry. A problem relating to the difficulty and suffering of living people sticks out as one of the most important topics that we could have found because we inherently understand how important it is.

We did choose homelessness as the final problem to research because it was really interesting and very relevant to our topics and the time of year. Winter is a really dangerous time for people living on the streets because the cold weather is a definite cause of death for people every year. Last year a homeless man was found dead in Verula

mium Park in my city St.Albans. The cause of death was found to be clearly exposure to freezing weather and so I already knew that this was a big problem in winter.

After deciding this as our problem, we again chose to research individually for a day or two and then bring all the research back together to find out what we had learned. This method of research worked really well the first time around so we thought that using it again could produce another load of research going in a few different directions to give us the most expansive research possible. If we had all worked on researching together I think we would have had a lot less content and information and would not have had a broad enough range to give us the best overview of homelessness as a whole. As long as everyone in the group pulled their weight and did a reasonable amount of research then the method would work well.

I started my research using the internet and looking to see what kind of

help the council had for homeless people to get out of the situation. I found the leeds.gov.uk website which actually did have a section aimed at tackling hoelessness. It had a lot of different links into different stages of homlessness and different specific aspects of homelessness which contained information on finding help and support in the individual situations. It seemed like the council was actually doing a lot for homeless people, however the information was almost entirely directed at financial trouble and people who would soon be homeless or who had no home but had somewhere to stay. This left out people who actually stay on the streets.

I also noticed that the 3 listed ways of contacting the council were an internet address, a phone number and a street address. Using internet, phone or mail are not possible for people who have no home or address as a base, leaving the only way to actually contact the government as going to the address. I found the only way to get this address easil

y was through the website, which could not be accessed by someone without a home or any access to internet connections, so it was kind of useless as well.

From this evidence I could see that the council was actively trying to make a difference and help to solve the problem, but they may have too much to deal with and way to many different aspects of homelessness to be able to successfully deal with the individual problem of people sleeping on the streets.

After this I wanted to do some research into the figures and facts that ha

d been researched into homelessness. I found a PDF research report specifically based on Leeds homelessness between 2002 and 2010 ( http://www.leeds.gov.uk/files/Internet2007/2007/week39/inter__4cd52992-b374-48a5-ae79-2cdf28cca509_190e05c5-983c-432a-a2c0-35a48e24a2f5.pdf ) . A few others in the group found the same PDF report so it was a good source of information which we had all accessed and used as some point of research. I read through a few pages that referred specifically to 'rough sleepers'. Rough sleeper is the term given to a homeless person who has nowhere at all to stay and has to stay on the street. The term varies from country to country, but generally it refers to someone who sleeps somewhere which makes them vulnerable to the outside world.

The report had some interesting information relating to rough sleepers. It had one graph which showed the number of rough sleepers counted at a few points during the year from 2002 to 2006. The graph seems to state that the number of rough sleepers in Leeds had decreased dramatically from 2002 to a point in march 2006 (the last record) when there was only 1 rough sleeper in Leeds. According to the report, the one rough sleeper was qu

ickly taken off the streets and given a home.

This information sounds to me like it is massively inaccurate. According to that report, there would then have been no rough sleepers in leeds at all once that one man was removed from the streets and I find that difficult to believe.

Another graph I found was trying to show how rough sleepers have 'support needs' and different experiences (for example, drug or alcohol abuse, past of violence, mental health issues). The information would be useful if the graph made any sense, but it makes itself too complicated to the extent that it is really difficult to read.

The graph shows values between 0 and 250 on the Y axis with no explanation of what measurement or relationship the value has to anything. It then shows the different types of support needs along the X axis which is fair enough, however the graph shows a red bar and a blue bar. The blue bar represents 'No of people' with no indication of who these people are or why they are represented here. The red bar then represents '% of total'. The indication here would be that the blue bar represents x-number of people who the research was done on, and then the red bar shows the percentage of those who had any of the special needs. If that was the case, then why would the blue bar change each time and not stay as the constant number of people that were used in the research? This is either really poor use of a graph or it clever manipulation of the graph to represent something other than the facts.

Both of these graphs are a good representation of how a graph can be used to represent basically anything you want it to. A graph looks official and straight cut and the information shown is generally not questioned because of the connotations with official office work and government reports which would surely be telling the truth. Graphs can be used to manipulate information very easily because they do not tell the whole story. A graph focusses only on the important aspects of the information that is wanted to be represented and can't really be seen as a reliable source.

A good example of this is the first graph claiming that only 1 rough sleeper was in leeds in march 2006. After talking to Gemma's mum who works in this general area, Gemma discovered that there are specific guidelines as to what area the rough sleepers are to be counted in and exactly what defines a rough sleeper. The graph doesn't have this information on or near it in the PDF and so it is technically not lying that they only found 1 rough sleeper, but the inference is that it means 'only 1 rough sleeper in Leeds' and this information is very unlikely to be true. I also found some information that said that a majority of recorded rough sleepers are men (almost 95%), because many homeless women use prostitution as a way to make money and get through their lives on the street. When asked, these women do not class themselves as homeless even though they do not have a 'home'.

I then discovered that in 2002, Leeds City Council released a plan to try and beat homelessness in Leeds. Interesting then that the graph peaks in october 2002 and drops significantly to almost half in just 5 months and then to about 6% of the original in just another 7 months reading only 3 rough sleepers in Leeds. To me it seems very likely that the council used this report to strengthen their support and to 'prove' that their homelessness campaign has almost completely irradicated rough sleepers in just 12 months.

Much later into the project I was lucky enough to speak to a rough sleeper briefly about his state of living and my research into homelessness in Leeds. I talked to him about the idea that there was only 1 rough sleeper in Leeds in march 2006 and he said it was not true at all. In fact he said that he was sleeping rough in 2006 and knew others that were as well. This just goes to support the idea that not all information, no matter how official it looks, can be trusted or considered reliable. This is a big danger with gathering secondary research.

Most of the rest of this report was about different states of homelessness and seemed much less important than the focus on rough sleepers. I consciously chose to focus my research on rough sleepers from this point, as they are the kind of homelessness that I always thought of when the word was used and this report had shown that they are the most vulnerable and in need of help.

Now that I had chosen to focus on rough sleepers I started to research what charities and organisations there are for homeless people. One charity that stood out was Crisis (http://www.crisis.org.uk/index.php). They are a homeless charity for single homeless people, offering support for accommodation, education, work experience and financial trouble. Crisis seem like a really great charity, and do a lot to help homeless people not only get off the streets and into a safe environment but also to reinstate themselves in society by offering them the ability to learn skills and support them with getting some experience and responsibility in a job. One really interesting aspect of Crisis is how intent they seem to help the individual person to make their life better instead of just 'homelessness' in general.

They have a really great way of helping homeless people train and get used to a real life job by offering them positions in the Crisis 'Skylight cafes' which are staffed by homeless people and ex-offenders. By getting the hands-on training and experience of real work they have a much greater opportunity to get their lives to a good standard which they can be happy with.

Unfortunately Crisis only have Skylight services available in London and manchester but hope to extend them across the UK in the future.

Researching Crisis gave me a really good idea of the things that should be being done to help end homelessness and actually work towards making peoples lives better instead of just giving them a temporary accommodation.

After doing this research I decided to look into what kinds of accommodation there are in Leeds for rough sleepers and the rules and regulations for receiving the accommodation and for staying there, expecting to find very little or nothing at all. In fact I found a website called www.homelessuk.org which is a really useful website listing loads of different types of accommodation and specialist support such as drugs and alcohol addiction advice. Overall there are 27 different types of accommodation on this website in or around Leeds alone.

I think it is great that these places exist, especially that there are so many of them available. Most house about 50 individuals, however there are clearly still issues with the system. one thing that I found is that some placed require the homeless person to have ID (often 2 forms). This is a big problem for homeless people who do not have ID as many rough sleepers do not.

Another thing that I have seen is that often the accommodation will only accept homeless people through a referral of an agency. This means that potentially a rough sleeper can approach the accommodation and not be given a room because self referral is not accepted.

These are minor problems on the scale of what these accommodations are contributing to the people who do live there and these precautions are very likely to be taken in the interest of safety and comfort for their other residents.

Accommodation is probably the most important aspects of dealing with homelessness. I think that once a homeless person has a safe place to stay which protects them from dangers outside that other aspects of helping them should then be tackled.

This is the majority of the important research which I did. Lots more relevant research was done by other members of the group and then collaborated with everyone elses.

At the end of the week of research, the group put together a short presentation (about 5 minutes long) where we planed out different parts to talk about and wrote up the key points on three A3 boards. We wanted to make sure that all the information was clear and well organised into different sections with supporting information on the boards and an interesting aesthetic.





The presentation went really well and i think everyone in the group did a good job and put in a lot of effort. The feedback was generally really positive aswell, the biggest downfall being that we did not really know where to take the project next (something that definitely showed in the next week of the brief).

We had some ideas to target the solution at the general public and encourage them to donate clothing and blankets to shelters which could have worked well but was quite vague. We discovered later that the issue with the difficulty was that our problem was too vague. 'Homelessness' is a problem which no one in the world has been able to solve to this day, so the chances of 6 first year graphic designers suddenly resolving the whole issue would be pretty unlikely. We needed to specify one specific problem within homelessness, targeting one specific audience.
This was the first step of the nest part of the brief.