Gulliver - A space for withdrawl during the day
Gulliver - Meeting the basic needs
Gulliver - Peasoup without bacon
Gulliver - Spacial mockups
Gulliver - Survival Station for the homeless
A survival station for the homeless in Cologne
In 1995, Köln International School of Design conducted a design project in the areas of service design and design management and developed a concept for Gulliver: a survival station for the homeless. In 2001, this unique social facility opened its doors in Cologne. Gulliver offers a meeting point for homeless men and women to maintain a mailbox and to have a dormitory to sleep in during the day and a dressing and room for personal hygiene. It also provides affordable snacks and hot drinks. With these facilities and its opening hours from 6am to 10pm, Gulliver closes a gap in the net of Cologne’s social facilities.
The student project included the development of stakeholder maps, desk research, expert interviews, extensive observations on the streets, shadowing, self-experiments and contextual interviews in order to understand the everyday life challenges of a homeless person. The resulting design included a service concept, an architectural layout, an organisational concept and a complimentary charitable financing plan. The KALZ and many supporters and donors implemented the concept in a shared effort.
In 2006, a student group from KISD and from the University of Applied Sciences, Düsseldorf revisited Gulliver to see how the guests perceive the services offered by the survival station and how the services could be improved. The results of this qualitative and quantitative study have been published in the book Erbsensuppe ohne Speck – Obdachlose und ihr Leben in Köln.
Background
The main goal of the Gulliver project was to discover the very basic needs of people living on the streets of Cologne and to design a place that supplies basic physical and psychological provisions. Challenges and obstacles that occurred during the project were manifold.
Overcoming the psychological gap of the young student researchers and stepping into the shoes of a socially unaccepted group.
Doing co-creation on the street without any design-related facilities. Creating a support system for the project, finding acceptance as designers in an environment that regards design as superfluous luxury. One of the biggest challenges was to gather supporters and donors for the actual implementation. The original project team was a student group from the Köln International School of Design that cooperated with employees of KALZ and the city of Cologne and co-created their vision of Gulliver, together with the homeless people of Cologne. Many partners and supporters were responsible for the implementation. Starting with the church, to architectural agencies, as well as private and public donors. In the second part of the project, ten years later, the Cologne students were supported by a team of students from Düsseldorf in a qualitative research process titled ‘Gulliver revisited’.
Project part 1: To develop a service proposition for homeless people in Cologne that goes beyond social work and is self sustaining.
Project Part 2: To revisit the survival station for the homeless and investigate improvements, redesigns and further service concepts.
Methodology & approach
Both project parts were strongly based on a user-centric empathic approach, carried out on several service design tools such as qualitative interviews with the target group, guerrilla observations, as well as self-experimentation and simulations. These insights were analysed and transformed into a service concept. The vision of the physical space was mocked up with paper prototypes and the service concept was visualised using a design approach.
Result
The second part of the project resulted in different concepts for improving the already successful work of Gulliver.
The Gulliver Coin is a concept for an alternative currency that allows potential donors to feel more comfortable about donating to the poor and homeless. Gulliver Coins can be purchased at any supermarket or kiosk and donated to a homeless person. They can then be exchanged for a beverage, a clothes wash or a hot shower at Gulliver. A music event with homeless people was prototyped and tested at Gulliver. It proved to be a platform for exchange, social gathering and a musical link between the Gulliver’s guests. The vision now is to extend the services into a hotel concept. The Gulliver Hotel would aim at meant filling the gap between daytime facilities for homeless people and the nighttime challenges of finding a place to sleep. Status and implementation : Gulliver, survival station for the homeless, has been successfully running since its inauguration in 2001.
Conclusion
‘Are you interested in buying a homeless newspaper? Or do you have a few coins?’ Who are the people behind this question? What is their life like? How do they survive living on the streets of cologne? The design project and the resulting survival station gave answers to many such questions. The key success of the space is that homeless people themselves mainly run it: people who understand the circumstances and challenges of everyday life on the street. Ten years after the first idea, the documentation of the second KISD project showed that the concept still works.
