Presenter: Elise O’Brien – Planning, Public Policy and Management
Faculty Mentor(s): Lisa Abia-Smith
Session: (Virtual) Creative Work—Connection, Escapism, Poetry and Exercise
The title of my piece refers to a statistic produced by a cruise ship company. Lisa Abia-Smith gave my class an assignment to visually represent a statistic. I chose “95% of people want to take a vacation.” To me this seemingly frivolous and meaningless statistic belies a deeper truth about our society: people are seeking escape. How can we build a society we don’t seek to escape from? How can we escape INTO our lives instead of away from them? How do we aim for utopia? It is my personal belief that this shift starts within and that it starts with empathy. To combat the empathy deficit that is a root factor in the growing housing crisis, I have developed a meditation for the unhoused. Please join me in a guided meditation where we explore the feeling of being lost: without papers and without home. We will meet a guide who will take us to a transitional village where we can explore feelings of relief and safety. What is safety? What is home? This meditation was designed with planners and landscape architects in mind and has space for design ideas to surface. Bring a paper and pen to jot down insights.