Every day, homelessness increases. Free choice or not, there are many reasons why people has to live on the streets. Stimulating Companies and Governments to work on social matters, Wheelly not meant to be the final solution to the problem, but to focus attention to the issue, trying to tear down the wall of social indifference, fostering integration, prejudice crossing and ensure a better life.
Formal and functional aspects: Wheelly is using a wheel as mobility and a city language. Its thickness of 40 cm allows the cart even to pass every door. When needed thanks to two folding tents the cart become a protected and intimate shelter with an insulated sleeping space and a collecting one where keeping staff or recovering your pet. Tents are designed to let people sleep both lying down or huddled up. Wheelly is designed to colonize and live all urban reality on its own or connected to other identities to create multible living shelter and unexpected colored allocations. Logos show the companies who helped into the production of the cart and give the opportunity to bring messages. During the day Wheelly can even be easily converted into a seat or a stall helping homeless in busking by giving them a confortable seat with a protection from the sun.
Problems solved by innovation: The project, following urban languages (ads, mobility, billboards) try to reintegrate the homeless into the socialeconomics context of the city, logos makes the cart to be less expensive or free. Its technology is designed to give a total fexibility in usage.
Users: homeless, people in the Third World, anyone need to combine requirements for mobility, protection and transportation. Field of application: corporation and society helping for social needs. Operation and technology: Wheelly has to solve mobility, protection and transoprt problems in the same time. For this reason the aluminium frame and the 250 lt cloth bag,does not move when the wheel is rolling, thanks to a system based on the roller bearing technology, made by pressed pare rolls. When stopping the handlebar is used to stop the rolling and let the cart be fixed on the ground. The folding polyester resin tents, stored into the frame, have little circular frame too, and can be opened to create the shelter. The sleeping space is insulated by a disc of neoprene.
Benefits for Human Beings: The project try to change and give a new point of view about the homeless condition,by giving not only a shelter, but even an chance for reintegration. In the morning the cart helps in moving and storing, but also giving several occasion for a job: playing instruments, selling things or newspapers, recycling . During the night, becoming a shelter, it gives the right privacy and intimacy that all human beings should have.
