Fraser Bean
(he/him)
Designer working primarily with sport, community, and visual identity. Drawn to socially engaged work that uses designed experiences; games, campaigns, and identities, to build empathy and belonging. Currently rooted in Glasgow’s grassroots culture, with a particular interest in how football holds people together across difference.
Home & Away
Home & Away is a social campaign designed to raise awareness of the lived experiences within the U.K. Asylum system and its flaws.
The goal of Home & Away is to equip community football players and coaches in Scotland with an experiential understanding of the U.K. asylum system, so that when asylum seekers join their teams, they are met with genuine empathy rather than well-meaning ignorance.
The campaign takes the form of an alternative rules football game that creates an interactive experience for players to learn by playing. The game is open source, with all materials available online for clubs and groups to run their own.
Over the past five years, the United Kingdom has experienced significant levels of migration, driven by concurrent global conflicts including the wars in Ukraine and Sudan, ongoing instability across the Middle East, and the largest asylum backlog in the country’s modern history, which is itself a product of sustained Home Office processing failures.
This, alongside years of dissatisfaction amongst the British public with the quality of life (cost of living, handling of the COVID pandemic, etc.), has seen immigration and new arrivals into the country become an easy target for the mainstream media and right-wing political parties to distract the public from the main issues at hand.
The U.K. currently lacks an across-the-board agreed integration policy. While Scotland has developed the internationally recognised New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy, there is no equivalent UK-wide approach. Immigration itself remains a reserved power of Westminster, meaning devolved governments, local councils, and third-sector organisations must simultaneously implement their own integration frameworks and mitigate the failings of the Home Office system – including: inadequate wait times, lack of support for those seeking asylum, and the trauma caused by the dispersal of individuals to unfamiliar cities across the country.
The project was born out of the vibrant grassroots and community football scene here in Glasgow, where many players have gone through the asylum system themselves. Within these teams, they find community and familiarity within new surroundings.
