At the University of Minnesota, Thomas Fisher’s students are learning a very important lesson about being architects: before they can be creative, they have to listen. After starting a project to help build homeless shelters, they began to talk to homeless people and discovered that shelters were irrelevant to them. What they wanted was for the police to stop taking and trashing their stuff when they drive them out from under bridges or tunnels.

As it turned out, their biggest complaint had a design solution: The students created highly magnetized packs in metallic colors that served to camouflage them. When the police come, their users can throw the bags up to the closest metal structure, and they stick.