lum.in.drop Press
DESIGN WITH A CAUSE
Meredith Morrison
Ryersonian Staff
At the heart of the downtown core, Ryerson is surrounded by flashy shops, restaurants and businesses. But another neighbour is less obvious: poverty. It was this overlooked issue that inspired a team of student designers to create the award-winning lum.in.drop project, which aims to use vacant urban spaces to highlight poverty.
If you have noticed the strange-looking yellow tape designs all over campus or the two little pods hanging off of the side of the interior design building, you have seen the lum.in.drop project.
Six second-year Ryerson interior design students headed the project after they were selected from their whole second-year class. Sarah Prest, Sandra Stephens, Erika van der Pas, Katherine Egenberger, Michelle McEachern, and Pooja Ramaswamy were chosen through an application process in September to represent the Ryerson school of interior design at Canada’s annual Interior Design Show from Jan. 26-29.
The only criterion for the project was that it had to address a problem that affected them in some way. They knew that they didn’t just want to create a space, or design furniture. That was too predictable. “One thing that we kept in mind was the theme of forgotten people, forgotten spaces,” Stephens explained.
The working poor are an invisible demographic. According to Campaign 2000, a branch of Family Service Toronto, approximately one-third of children living under the poverty line have at least one parent working full time. Also, according to 2010 data, a quarter of workers made less than $13.32 an hour, hardly enough to live on.
Poverty is a serious social problem and the team wanted to bring it to light in a unique way. “The colour comes from our name and our original inspiration for the concept comes from a lighthouse or a beacon,” said McEachern. “So something that could work as a marker throughout the city to shed light on this issue, so yellow just seemed to kind of fit. And also, it’s fairly light-hearted and bright, so physically the object would draw attention and be visually present.”
Besides the colour, every other aspect of the project was carefully planned. The name lum.in.drop is more than a play on words. “The name actually came in three parts,” explained van der Pas. “We started with this idea of lumin which is the Latin base for light and that kind of went along with our theme of the lighthouse.” There was also meaning behind the periods in the name. “And the ‘in’ is surrounded by two dots which kind of represents that there is something inside of it, so it’s suggesting that it’s a storage pod.”
Inspiration was set and it was time to get started. With a busy first semester, it wasn’t until December that the team started working.
It was a full-time job and they did everything themselves – from buying the material, to creating the prototypes, to constructing a physical booth for the show.
The students, who describe themselves as a little family, worked at least 10 hours a day, six days a week, for nearly two months. For them, actually going to class was a break from the messy project. “There was foam in my bra, foam in my bed, foam everywhere,” said Stephens.
Despite the tough schedule, they worked well together. Monica Polo, the design centre resource specialist at the Ryerson school of interior design, got a chance to watch them work on their project. “They are an interesting group of ladies. They were able to push each other in different aspects so it was good to see them work.”
Finally, the Interior Design Show was upon them. The girls set up their booth and were ready to compete. “People were curious enough to read all of our posters and they wanted to understand more,” said van der Pas.
Not only did the project generate interest, it won first place out of all of the design school displays at the show. They were up against five other schools with more conventional booths and their ingenuity came out on top.
But sparking discussion about poverty is the real goal of the project. “I really liked the idea of it becoming kind of an iconic image, like the AIDS ribbon or something like that,” said Prest. “They’d see this beautiful faceted object and it would represent this cause.”
Alizeh Hussain, the interim coordinator at Campaign 2000, was excited to see students and youth shedding light on the issue of poverty in Toronto. “Sometimes, we kind of look away, and this is saying that we don’t have a choice, we can’t look away anymore.”
The team also hopes that the lum.in.drops themselves could eventually provide resources like food or clothing to meet the needs of the surrounding community. Although the project is still in its infancy, the team has given some thought to the logistics of how they could make it work on the streets.
First the designers would need to figure out exactly what the pods would be made of and how they would work. Engineers would be consulted in order to make the pulley systems that would hoist and lower the pods and attach them to the sides of buildings. They would also need to create the mechanisms to open and close the pods.
Then the team would find a non-profit partner to fill the pods. The contents would have to be determined by the partner organization.
“By nature it’s an object that can’t just be handled by the working poor directly because it needs some sort of control,” said van der Pas. “So for example, if it was the Salvation Army perhaps it could be clothing inside. Also I think it depends on where the beacons are placed – different neighborhoods may have different needs.”
The first phase of the lum.in.drop project is complete. There are still many directions that the project could go, and Polo agrees. “That’s the beauty of this project. It can go anywhere.”
Ryersonian Newspaper February 8th 2012
Full Article: http://www.ryersonian.ca/article/19831/