Research shows that many people at one time or another feel lonely and it mostly has nothing to do with how many friends one has, or how wide of a social network a person moves in. Roozenburg delved into this topic whilst working on a project for the Ministry of Health a well as some private health care companies. This year she wants to transform her findings into a series of social design events.
“I think how we deal with loneliness says a lot about society,” says designer Maaike Roozenburg. “We live in a risk society. We have a lot of liberty – we can choose what we do, where we live, how we live … We can choose our friends, out city, which is all very new. People did not live like that even 50 years ago. And the problem is that it just doesn’t work out for a lot of us.”
Society used to be guided by more regulated social structures - the church, the village, the family all offered facilities that kept people feeling secure and together. “And once you cast that off, life became more about self-responsibility,” says Roozenburg. “You make your own choices then you take responsibility for them. I think it is because the choice is yours that loneliness has become so taboo to talk about.”
“The Ministry deals with this issue in a very conservative way,” she says. “They call in sociologists, graph makers, book designers and strategists. Then they make a slogan and a poster, but I am not sure if that really reaches people. I want to do something more public that recognizes that loneliness is very common even before it becomes an official statistic.”