DELFT HOME HUNTERS

A playful match-making app + wearable device to find your ideal housemates in a Dutch University Town

GOAL

HOW TO FIND A HOme AND ideal roommates IN A FOREIGN CITY?

The project was undertaken as part of my MSc in Design for Interaction at TU Delft, The Netherlands. The university, world-class engineering and design hub in Europe, has a student community of over 30,000 students per year, both Dutch and from all over the world.

I was inspired to work on two key issues I identified regarding student housing:

1. The existing system made it hard for students to find their ideal roommates, people that shared similar interests and ways of living.

2. Dutch and international students were not encouraged to live together, leading to cultural segregation and lack of social cohesion.

My goal was to create a system that would enable both national and international students find their ideal homes/home-mates in a fun and effective process, encouraging community building and multicultural coexistence.

PROCESS

Initial ethnographic research focused on understanding the current dynamics and social interactions during HOUSE HUNTING in Delft from the perspective of international and Dutch students, using WORKBOOKS and GROUP CO-CREATION SESSIONS.

My RESEARCH GOALS were:

1. gain insight on the different kinds of HOME HUNTING EXPERIENCES related to the existing opportunities in the local market,

2. identify the EMOTIONAL HIGHS AND LOWS of the house-hunting experience, for the new comers and the Dutch residents

3. formulate initial proposals to ENHANCE THE HOUSE HUNTING EXPERIENCE for both Dutch and International students.

KEY INSIGHTS

• For the home hunting experience, Dutch students employ a system called INSTEMMING, where prospective candidates were invited as a group to the house and interviewed by the housemates in group. The housemates then voted for the preferred roommate.

• The instemming requires a lot of preparation and coordination work for the house residents, with inefficiencies and possible conflicts.

• For the home hunters it was very stressful, like applying for a job, and most of the times the instemming would penalize international students because they didn’t understand the process and felt out of place adapting to the rules of a foreign country.

both the Dutch and the International student had the desire to meet more of each other and mingle with different cultureS, but the absence of a smooth process that could help them screen out non-matching individuals made them go for the familiar.

concept

With the results of the ethnographic research and co-creation session, I created a concept for an digital/ physical platform, inspired by the INTERACTION VISION of PIRATE COMPANIONSHIP. Pirate companionship is adventurous, fun, a little rebellious, powered by shared goals and individual needs, a bit opportunistic and temporary in nature, but with the chance to create life-long friendships.

Developing from this vision I tried to favor the development of a FAMILIARITY between Dutch & international students, enabling an interest for establishing a SHARED HOME FEELING, increasing multicultural interaction and integration of diversity for mutual growth.

OUTPUT

The final output is a PRODUCT-SERVICE SYSTEM consisting in both digital and physical components: a WEB BASED SOCIAL PLATFORM to MATCH HOUSE HUNTERS and OWNERS and an INTERACTIVE WRISTBAND connected to the platform. The hunting wristbands vibrate when two possible matches are in proximity, encouraging REAL LIFE ENCOUNTERS and a GAMIFICATION of the house-hunting experience.

I designed an initial paper prototype of the web application, focusing on the profiling of the house hunter and of the homes. The idea was to create user profiles that would have 2 types of criteria:

FUNCTIONAL CRITERIA

Typical criteria that are useful to find a good house: type of room desired/offered, type of home, how many housemates, how many bathrooms, proximity to the University campus, proximity to the city center etc..

PERSONALITY CRITERIA

Hobbies and activities the home hunters and home owners liked to engage in, what they liked to share, what their interests were and habits in their living spaces.

The combination of FUNCTIONAL & PERSONALITY CRITERIA will enable a more accurate matchmaking between the home hunters and the home owners, to facilitate a good match on all the desired aspects. This would not eliminate the need for an in-person meeting at the home and on the final agreement on the part of the home residents on who was the winning new house mate, but it would make the process more:

• EFFICIENT - weed out automatically the people who didn’t match at all

• EFFECTIVE - allow the potentially right matches to have a chance to be SEEN, and known, beyond first impressions

• PERSONAL - enable self reflection on what are the important aspects in a common living situation while studying

• FUN - gamify the process of home hunting by making it a contextual game to be played with a wearable device, RFID tags and a bit of curiosity

DELFT HOME HUNTERS WEB APP

1. DELFT HOME HUNTERS LANDING PAGE.

Home Hunters and Homes can sign up to find their match

2. SIGNUP FORM for the Home Hunters

3. HOUSE HUNTING PROFILE

4. MY IDEAL HOME PROFILE

The Home Hunter fills it in with their preferences

5. THE HUNTING BAND

The Home Hunter chooses the style of the active RFID wristband that allow them to “hunt” for housemates in the city.

6. CHECK OUT PAGE for the purchase of the hunting band.

7. CONFIRMATION SCREEN, telling the package is on its way

8. MATCHES PAGE

The Home Hunter can view the matches description & contact them but he can’t see them. The game allows them to see each other if they respond, or if they connect on the street with the hunting band

VIDEO

The Project Delft Home Hunters was exhibited during the event “Delft Amazing Technology” in Delft in March 2012.

Also, the insights of the project in terms of creating HYBRID COMMUNITIES, which combined users interactions in both physical and digital spaces, were presented in a paper called Agorà 2.0: Designing Hybrid Communities. The paper was presented during the biannual conference Communities and Technologies in Munich in July 2013 and won Best Paper Award.