Patchworks

Patchworks is a citizen-led co-design project to design innovative technologies for and with homeless people in the North West of England. The project involved 3 quite distinct communities: Signposts, a community resource centre that works with homeless people in Morecambe; Madlab, a community of DIY hackers and creative technologists in Manchester; and an interdisciplinary community of academics from bio-medicine, computing, art-design, anthropology and management science from Lancaster University, as part of the Catalyst project (www.catalystproject.org.uk). This video was made to communicate the Patchworks research to a wider public audience. It shows how through a series of practical electronics workshops and discussions the co-design team developed a prototype to help homeless people, whose lives are often characterised as 'chaotic', to access important appointments.