Competition Entry for the 2020 James R. Boyce Affordable Housing Competition
January 2020 - May 2020 | ARCH 202 at UC Berkeley
In collaboration with Anna Driscoll, Amanda Fukutome-Lopez, Dori Ganetsos and Lily Oyler
Critical Question:
How can an empathic design approach help designers tackle social issues?
Problem
Homelessness is a wicked problem. While designing more housing is important, we as designers must tackle the problem with empathy in order to make meaningful impact. My teammates and I held onto this belief as we entered the UC Berkeley competition to develop homeless housing for veterans in Woodlake, Sacramento.
Research
To understand the people and community we are serving, we spent the following few weeks reaching out to stakeholders and residents.
We identified 4 critical design drivers from our interview responses:
Empathizing
While interviews helped us to understand the needs of the stakeholders, we designed two personas to guide our design process: a formerly homeless veteran tenant and a member from the neighborhood association.
Visualizing
Borrowing the method of storyboarding in user research, I crafted various spatial vignettes as customized walk-throughs for the two personas developed earlier. We presented these visuals as stories to garner support and feedback from the stakeholders we interviewed in the beginning of the competition.
Through these stakeholder presentations, we were able to receive feedback from housing and veteran experts while generating enthusiasm among residents for the potential development.