Housing Horns
A design solution aimed to improve the accessibility of housing to students at the University of Texas at Austin
Design for America, Design Solution Project
Most freshman undergraduate students in UT Austin choose to live in university dorms due to the difficulty of finding off-campus housing by the time admission decisions are given out. However, as soon as these high school graduates arrive at the campus, they are instantly pressured by a new, incredibly time consuming task: finding housing for the sophomore year. To students from another city in Texas, this task already a hard task, due to outdated student housing resources and Austin’s recent years of rising housing prices. To out-of-state and international students, this process becomes even more mentally taxing, especially with how challenging it already is to get used to college life in a different region or country.
Housing Accessibility Project is one of the two new projects set to launch in Fall 2021 in Design for America UT Austin studio. Its goal is to come up with a design solution to alleviate the difficulty of housing search of all students in UT Austin, whether undergrad and grad students. This is a long term project aimed to be practically deployed and achieved across multiple semesters. Personally, I am honored to be admitted to the studio and selected to participate in this project in during first and second semesters. In the two semester I was able to participate in, the first semester started with a focus mainly on research, gathering information and initial ideation, while the second semester focused on ideation and prototyping.
Role:
Duration: Approx. 8 months (Sep 2021 - May 2022)
Team:
First Phase(Sep - Dec): Ryan Jacob, Yang-Kai Hsieh (Me), Samvida Srivastava, Peggy (Chiayu) Hu
Second Phase(Jan - May): Yang-Kai Hsieh (Me), Samvida Srivastava, Salma Teran, Rahaf Aljerwi, Emma George, Stephanie Nieto
Tools: Figma, Google Slides, Zoom(Interviews)
Role: Ideation, Research, Prototyping, Product Design
Project Overview
For better understanding of the problem, in the first phase, we interviewed students, housing scouts, and potential stakeholders like larger companies that manage student housing in UT Austin’s West Campus Area. We also made surveys distributed in numerous student classes to learn more about student thought on the matter. In this phase, we mainly do work collaboratively through Zoom calls. I personally went to in-person meetings with Ryan for interviewing larger companies like American Campus or West Campus Livings
There are four main steps we took in this first phase of the project. Information here will be presented in the form of our expo slideshow with explanation, as I feel it has a very accurate depiction of the our research process.
First Phase: Research / Initial Ideation
Phase 1 Team ↑
After pinpointing the problems, we started by making personal problem statements. As there are 2 of the 4 of us are international students (Me and Peggy), we were able to conjure many problems we encountered when looking for housing in Austin.
First, we started by pinpointing a problem statement and the selections of housing commonly available to students.
Next, we started our interviews. These interviews in-person meetings with larger companies like West Campus Livings, American Campus, and zoom meetings with individual housing scouts to get their insight on the potential problems they see when working with students to find housing.
After the interviews and information gathering, we started making How Might We statements, and came up with potential solutions associated with each viable statements
Lastly, we did some initial ideation on the potential solutions to our problems.
In phase 2, me and Samvida are the only two phase 1 members that remained, with many new members joining. After communication the core goals of the project to the new members, this semester, our focus is on ideation and prototyping.
I personally participated in every work meeting and contributed to both to ideation and prototyping phase. Note that many images of prototype product is created through collaborative effort, and not all images are created by me. I was the main proposer and creator of the concepts and prototype of community forums, for example.
Phase 2 : Ideation / Prototype
Phase 2 Team ↑
We continued on our project by backtracking and improving some of the survey questions and adding to the information we have gotten in our phase 1 interviews.
Next, we started defining the changes we would like to see and set objectives based on out solution
Ideation: Addressing our How Can We’s
Prototype: Building a Physical Solution
Below is a gallery of product prototype
Conclusion / Future
As the aim of this project is to ultimately create a working platform to improve the housing accessibility problems experienced by students in UT Austin, this project would continue to the next phase in the following semester in hopes of making this prototype a reality. While I will not be able to participate as a team member in this phase due to academic plans, I look forward to seeing our contributions end up in reality, and hopefully a concrete improvement in the difficulty of finding student housing for future students attending the University of Texas at Austin.