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Monday, April 02, 2007

Please Keep our Streets Clean: Over 818 People Have to Sleep on Them

Seen around Toronto:

"Please Keep our Streets Clean: Over 818 People Have to Sleep on Them"

"Homeless Sleeping, QUIET"


"Approximately 5052 Homeless Living in Toronto as of April 2006"

Turns out these signs are the work of Mark Daye, a 4th year graphic design student at OCAD, who says:
Instead of rebranding a product, or service for my 4th year thesis project I chose to represent a local population that usually gets overlooked. I re-coded official signage and affixed 30 of them to poles in the downtown core with messages pertaining to an obvious but ignored urban sub culture. The goal was not only to catch people off guard by creating signs that acknowledge the homeless population on a seemingly official level, but to get people to think about codes of behaviour, conformity, acceptance and to maybe spare some consideration for the homeless who live mostly ignored in the city, blending into the background just like the signs.


"2 Homeless People Die Every Week in Toronto"


Via 3 excellent Toronto blogs: Torontoist, BlogTO, and Spacing Wire

UPDATE (APRIL 4): Reactionary Signs

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a fantastic project!

Good for him.

Anonymous said...

I think this project is absolutely brilliant!! The thing that bugs me the most is how desensitized so many Canadians have become to the sight of poor homeless people lying on the streets all around them. This should hopefully make it just a little harder to see homeless people as invisible...

ancient clown said...

Bless you & KUDO's as well. It is long overdue seeing the TRUTH being advertised. I'm going to add this to my site as well to help increase the range of views. I'll link back here and to homelessnation as well.
your humble servant,
ancient clown

ewingsc said...

Awesome. Fantastic. Great stuff !