Maintain connection with people in situations of extreme exclusion

Ariane is my graduation project, carried out independently over a year and a half as part of my Master's in Management and Innovation at École de Design Nantes Atlantique. It grew out of my dissertation on "language," which raised questions about communication with people in situations of deep vulnerability. In France in 2012, nearly 100,000 people were living without shelter or in makeshift housing. Behind that figure: widely varied profiles, fractured life histories, and a fragmented support system where relief organizations struggle to coordinate and provide continuity of care. Ariane proposes a comprehensive service to maintain the connection with these individuals: a connected device distributed to homeless people, a mobile app for relief organizations, and a shared tracking logic that holds the whole system together.

The benchmark revealed an almost total absence of solutions designed with homeless people as active users of a service. Existing systems are almost exclusively built from the perspective of support organizations, with little consideration for the experience or agency of the person in exclusion. Studying the pager from the 1990s as a reference object proved particularly instructive: its robustness, simplicity of use, and independence from a complex screen interface made it a relevant model for a public that may not read French or has never used a smartphone.

I conducted three one-hour interviews across four complementary profiles: a Red Cross volunteer, a Samu Social employee, a psychologist in an addiction medicine unit, and a formerly homeless person. These conversations surfaced two structural problems that housing alone does not solve: the lack of coordination between relief organizations, who often intervene with no knowledge of the person's history, and the absence of long-term follow-up, whether medical, psychological, or administrative. These two axes shaped the entire project.

Early in the research phase, I made a deliberate choice not to tackle the housing problem itself, which is central but already addressed by many existing actors, and instead focus on two less-covered angles: inter-organizational coordination and individual long-term follow-up. That framing shaped the entire service architecture. The final scope covered three distinct but interdependent objects: the connected device for homeless people, the mobile app reserved for relief organizations, and the printed materials included in the kit, user guide, profile sheet, and packaging.

The service is built around two parallel journeys that converge at the moment of an alert. On the beneficiary side, interaction is deliberately reduced to a single gesture: sending an alert based on its nature, whether medical, psychological, or safety-related. In return, the device communicates an estimated wait time and notifies the person when help is nearby, without ever requiring them to read or type anything. On the organizations' side, the app displays active alerts in order of priority, provides access to the beneficiary's profile, and keeps a record of every intervention. That shared memory is the heart of the project: it transforms a series of one-off interventions into a coherent, continuous form of care.

The formal direction of the device was shaped by two hard constraints: physical robustness for use in difficult conditions, and immediate legibility for a potentially non-literate or non-French-speaking audience. Following feedback from the graduation jury, I revised the technical design of the device to give more space to the physical interface and improve repairability, making replaceable components easier to access. The mobile app interface was designed with the same clarity in mind, with an information hierarchy centered on urgency and immediate action.

As a graduation project, there was no development phase. The deliverables covered the full design chain: research dissertation, design dossier, user journeys and stakeholder mapping, UI mockups for the app, 3D models and dimensioned technical drawings of the connected device, business model canvas, and printed kit materials. Everything was presented and defended before a professional jury in September 2016.

The project was successfully defended in September 2016 before a professional jury. The jury's feedback led to the evolution of several initial choices, particularly around the technical design of the device, and validated the overall coherence of the approach. Ariane remained an academic project without industrial or associative follow-up, but it stands as one of the most complete design experiences I have led, from field research through to the technical drawings of a physical object.

This project taught me what it actually means to lead a project from end to end. Not just designing screens or an object, but defining the boundaries of the problem yourself, deciding where to focus your energy, and arbitrating between what is desirable and what is achievable within a given timeframe. That is a skill you only truly develop in a situation of complete autonomy, when no one else sets the frame for you. What would I do differently? I would have pushed further into testing with the end beneficiaries themselves, meaning homeless people directly. The interviews with relief actors were invaluable, but they remain a mediated view of lived experience. Putting the prototype in front of the people it was designed for would likely have shifted some design decisions, and it is a blind spot I have carried with me ever since.