A project run for the course "Social Innovation" as part of the Interaction Design master program at Malmö University.
Team: 5 students
Stakeholders: Röda Oasen - an organization, consistent of 7 stakeholders who together will own and live in one of the houses in Sege Park, an area in Malmö, Sweden to be fully renovated in 2020. They were currently planning the co-living setting (kollektivhus) that they'd like to have established then in their house.
Brief: Come up with design that could contribute to their endeavors
Span: 8 weeks
Brief: Come up with design that could contribute to their endeavors
Span: 8 weeks
Acquaintance with the context
We started with exploring the various context factors of the given assignment:
- Researched who Röda Oasen are
- Met 2 of the stakeholders [& arranged meetings with them every other week]
- Went to the Segepark area to explore the surroundings of the future co-living space of our stakeholders
- Went to Design Center Exhibition exploring architects suggestions of solutions for the future Segepark, as the area is expected to implement urban development innovations
- Brainstorm possible collaborators for our project
Exploring Sege Park and the surroundings of Röda Oasen's future co-living house
Field work
Next was to contact those relevant stakeholders who live in various co-living settings and arrange visits to those of them that we could get access to given the limited time frame we had. Over the visits of those places, we engaged in conversations with the residents via preliminary open-ended but yet semi-structured interviews.
Over the whole field work part of the project we distributed the visits of the locations between the team members for optimal use of the given time: the Danish-based team members visited those in Denmark, while me and the other Malmö-based member visited the ones in Sweden.
Interviews were help with both a resident and an employee working there
Svanavåg is a co-living set on a boat. The residents sharing the space being mostly young & artistically oriented
The Greenhouse in Malmö as a co-living space supporting "green" lifestyle by the design of the building itself
Workshops
After the initial collection of impressions and reflections and their analyzing, we prepared 2 workshop activities to run in the next two places we were going to visit. The workshop activities were accompanied with semi-structured interview questions to aid the emerging discussions.
A co-living housing for student, based in Copenhagen, Denmark
A collective housing, based in Malmö, Sweden
Design Openings
After analyzing and summarizing the insights from the field work & workshops, we identified several design openings. Then we prepared to present them for discussion and additional insights during the only opportunity we had to meet all of the Röda Oasen's stakeholders.
Summed the core of the openings and prepared use-cases that reflect them to aid the stakeholder's discussion
Ran a workshop with all stakeholders to discuss design openings from their perspectives
Brainstormed solutions within the design openings based on field work & workshops insights
Prototype
Out of the scope of the brainstormed design concepts, we chose to implement the one that all team members thought most related to the field insights and the design openings while being at the same time practically doable within the short time we had left.
Arduino (and a lot of soldering)
Laser cutting and glueing
Final model of the product concept
Assembling it all together piece by piece
The final interactive prototype
Story boards
To visualize possible uses and ways to contribute to the co-living setting in practice, several storyboards were developed to depict the various ways the artifact could potentially influence the collective housing environment and its residents.
*The storyboards were created by me while the rest of the team members were finalizing the assembling of the prototype and trouble shooting it.
*The storyboards were created by me while the rest of the team members were finalizing the assembling of the prototype and trouble shooting it.
