Design for good
SCAD Serve Partnership
Design brief
In the SCAD Serve: Design for Good class, we were lucky to partner with an amazing organization in Savannah, Emmaus House Soup Kitchen, who’s design brief concerned redesigning and reimagining their Tuesday and Wednesday program, Clothing Closet. We worked in collaboration with the organization itself to develop ideas that would work best for them, including a comprehensive workshop during the midpoint and a final delivery that included a complete space and system transformation.
The Savannah Clothing Closet, started in 2014, attempts to fill a vital gap for those experiencing homelessness: acquiring clean and suited clothing. While shelters might provide some shelter and soup kitchen provide food, many left in-between need goods like clothing, backpacks, and tents. The Clothing Closet, run in partnership with Emmaus House, Epiphany Church, and SCAD Serve, operates every Wednesday morning to serve its clients, as well as has volunteers sort and clean the clothing the day before.
Stakeholder map
COnducting REsearch
Through a variety of primary and secondary research methods, including but not limited to observation, staff and expert interviews, a sensory cue canvas, and case studies, we learned more about Emmaus House, the Clothing Closet, and homelessness in the Savannah area to best understand the ways that we could assist Emmaus and provide the best service for the clients.
Midterm presentation and co-creation workshop, October 2022
Affinitizing our data
In order to gather and sort our research, we used sticky notes to plot all of our insights over the course of the past couple months, sorting issues and solutions based off their space in the week, and then connected issues across the days to understand what the larger underlying issues were with the entire system.
RENOVATING THE SPACE
Finally it was time to implement the changes we saw necessary to the space. That included deep cleaning, organizing, painting, and sourcing new forms of storage, all which allowed us to transform the space to provide a more comfortable environment that’s far easier to operate in, especially once the new sorting system was implemented.
Sensory cue canvas being conducted, September 2022
co-creation workshop
Our co-creation workshop allowed us to touch base with Emmaus House as clients and understand what ways we could direct our research and solutions to what they best needed. Our agenda included brainstorming and mapping our ideas on a matrix, prototyping a new digital form, and creating a model of the space to workshop with the volunteers who run the space on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
November 2022
Our (very small!) team getting the job done, November 2022
