LOOKING OFFICIAL: TORONTO DESIGN STUDENT DRAWS ATTENTION TO HOMELESSNESS IN TORONTO:

Fourth year graphic design student Mark Daye created more than a little stir with his "thesis project" . Suddenly official looking signs began to appear along major downtown intersections with advisories like "Homeless Sleeping:Quiet", "Please Have Change Ready For Homeless",and "Please Keep Our Streets Clean: Over 826 People Have To Sleep On Them" amongst others. In explaining his project Daye said,

"Instead of rebranding a product or service for my fourth year thesis project I chose to represent a local population that usually gets overlooked. I re-coded official signage abd affixed 30 of them to poles in the downtown core with messages pertaining to an obvious but ignored urban subculture. 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 behavior, 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."

The signs were made of hard plastic or aluminum and bolted to various posts.The city of Toronto was, needless to say, not amused and removed the signs as fast as they could find them. Local commentators, however, at websites such as flickr.com, blog to and torontoist.com lauded the signs . To get a gander at some of the signs posted go to http://spacing.ca/wire/?p=1723 , the website of Spacing Magazine in Toronto.

Molly