The idea is to come up with a unified visual language that can be used to reach out to Hawaii’s homeless and better connect them with helpful services.

The process began Aug. 17 when civic-minded designers and state officials gathered to brainstorm ideas to make it happen.

The man behind "Bytemarks Cafe" — a one-hour Hawaii Public Radio show that highlights innovation and creativity within the state’s technology community — helped host the event.

"As technologists or designers or civic innovators, how do we get involved in some of these social challenges that are facing us and contribute something that is our expertise?" Burt Lum asked a group of about two dozen volunteers gathered at the Hawaii Community Development Authority in Kakaako, ready to put their brains to work.

Lum, who is also the executive director of Hawaii Open Data, said state officials often are unable to get creative with how to handle homelessness issues and tend to get bogged down with "the tactical things that they’ve got to do to get their programs going."

"This is kind of (taking) a step back and looking at it from more of a visual standpoint," Lum explained. "I know there’s data out there, data’s important, but what about the visual, what are you trying to capture?"

Designers volunteered to attend the event. Although state workers participated, it was not government-sponsored.

Colin Kippen, head of the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, said he was "jazzed" about the effort and the fact that the private sector took it upon itself to help the public sector in such a unique way.

Kippen said he thinks "once we start to push in this direction what you’ll have is the private sector leading the public sector."

"I think you’ll see streams come together in a river, but it’s the innovators now, like Burt and some of the other folks here, that are really pushing this," he said.

The main goal of the meeting held last weekend was to start to design simplistic icons that could later be used to represent the state’s homeless services in a small image on an application for a phone or tablet. Ideally, the symbols would become easily recognizable by the community without verbal explanation, like men and women restroom signs or handicap parking spaces.

"My brain runs wild when I start to think about all of the possibilities," Kippen said. "But I do know that these kinds of initiatives are best started somewhere other than in government because government is very inflexible; and this kind of innovation and creativity is something I think at some future date we can simply start to take our data and information and meld it together with whatever … that fruit that’s developed in this creative process."

Lum said he got the idea to host the event as part of an international effort called the Noun Project, which is focused on building a global visual language and encourages local design workshops called IconLocals to add to the growing visual glossary.

This was Hawaii’s first IconLocal, and designers said they walked away feeling fulfilled and glad they participated.

"Being part of a church or a religious organization you only see a small part of how you help the homeless, but by doing this you realize that there’s so many aspects to helping the homeless," said Mae Ariola, a 33-year-old freelance designer. "A homeless person might not know who to go to but if there’s these symbols — and they’re so simplistic that they can see them if they speak Chuukese or Japanese or English … they know where to go."

Jon Lewis, 24, said he has done design work for nonprofit companies before, but "nothing like a ‘let’s get a bunch of people together and brain dump’ (where) nobody’s walking away from it not fulfilled."

Kippen said he was met mostly with blank stares from council members after he and Lum proposed designing a visual language to reach out to the homeless.

"It was a hard sell," he said. "The difficulty was they couldn’t make the translation to what we were talking about; they couldn’t see that what we were trying to do was create a holistic picture and show how everything relates to everything else. Instead, you know, they’re all segmented.

"This was a real, real attempt to break out of the silos."

Connie Mitchell, who runs the Institute for Human Services, told the group that she saw the potential "for designers to really help us simplify the process or the journey that people have when they’re homeless."

"I think if we can have more conversations like that we’ll be better off," she said at the end of the day.

The depth of discussion at the event was "a very pleasant surprise" for Cynthia K.L. Rezentes of the Leeward Housing Coalition.

"There were different symbols — there were some that showed somebody actually sleeping on a park bench and then pairing it up to other services like maybe a question mark for ‘If you need information, go here,’ or you know, ‘This is where maybe an outreach office is,’" Rezentes said.

Lum said the next step is to go through the sketches and images that were generated and edit them down to a final product. In the meantime, some icons will be uploaded to the Noun Project’s website, he said.