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In this second year design class Olin, my team and I worked a semester with the Tiny Home community. We went through three phases- Explore, Conceptualize, and Develop, to create a final design by the end of the semester. We developed a system to fit the values of the Tiny Home community by aligning them within the city of Boston. We designed the future of Boston: A new future where tiny homes could be secured to the tops of row houses in Boston.
We met with members of the tiny home community. We worked with them over the semester, where we were able to co-design and brainstorm with them. This allowed us to develop personas, which were used to convey the experiences of the user group. We developed documentation to capture ideas with liberal use of post-its. We were able to record thoughts and make frameworks.
The final deliverable of the project was a to scale model representation of the row-houses of Boston. We also developed posters that gave outsiders context to the project and shared how this changed the future of Boston. |
Finding our Users
Finding people who live in tiny homes in Boston, was not the easiest task. There is large legislative battles going on in Boston proper for the right to call Tiny Homes homes. This meant that people who had tiny homes were not going to be found directly in Boston. For this project to be successful we needed to get our main users involved in the process as soon as possible. We joined a group of Tiny Home Enthusiasts on a website called "Meet-UP" in order to build our network. We went to a small meet up of individuals where we met a man who was working on tiny home legislation in Boston. He was one of our first break through users, that opened our minds to the possibilities and our network to other individuals. Through various meet-ups and other contacts, we were able to grow our connections to Tiny Home enthusiasts. We met artists, and inventors who were looking into the tiny home revolution. We eventually, due to the community's word of mouth found a man living in Andover, MA who let us into his tiny home. Through the community and talking to many different people we discovered our user group in the area- even though they were few and far between. We grew our understanding of the user group from those who wanted to live in tiny homes, those who did live and tiny homes, and tiny home enthusiasts.
Synthesis
During the process of discovering and exploring the "Tiny Home Owner" landscape, we needed to synthesize our data. We needed to come up with valuable ways to draw insights from our users. We also had to develop frameworks to help ourselves, as well as our professors empathize with this user group. We did this by developing various frame works. These took the forms of three personas, experience maps, and axes ( to help us gather correlation based insights). We built the foundation to strengthen our ability to understand our user's context and to better brainstorm high impact, low effort solutions for our users. This allowed us to better brainstorm ideas and develop whether they would be useful for our user groups.
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Output:
After we went through the first two phases of our design process, we were able to finally narrow down to one idea. After co-designing with our users, we were able to refine the idea to its final form for the class. At the end we described a Boston, where Tiny Homes could live on top of the row houses of Boston. To gather information we talked with construction and building structure experts and discussed if it was possible to retrofit older homes to support new structures on rooftops. It was determined that depending on information about the building- information that is publicly available- you could place Tiny Homes on rooftops with various safety procedures. In order to best represent our information, we developed a scale model to show people on the rooftops, with their homes. We also developed informational posters to go along with our model, to share the information gathered with people who hadn't spent as much information with our group.
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Reflection:
I would love to say this was a perfect project. However, it definitely was not (is there ever really a "perfect" project--no). While it did give us better context to the issues held by Tiny Home Owners, we didn't get to talk to as many people who actually owned Tiny Homes. Being in Boston- where there is a legal issue at the moment with the homes- there were many people who were THINKING about owning tiny homes. This meant that we only talked to one person who owned a tiny home. In the long run it ended up working out- we got enough context from those who wanted to own tiny homes. However it would have been preferable for more tiny home owner context. It also would have been preferable, for us to better document our documentation