Healthy Homes in Chinese Urban Environments 

High Lane Concept on Tudou


Fast, Flexible Mobile Space for Fun (aka Dr. Fab's Instant Dance Party)  on Tudou

Cool Tips on Tudou


(more coming soon...)

Susan presenting.

A crowd of experts.

Three presentations

Prototypes.

Feedback session with experts.

Preparing to prototype the experience.

Acting is hard.

Being fabulous is harder.

Good work, good times.  Healthy Homes Shanghai Workshop at the Eco Design Fair.

Adventures in Design Research (flickr set)

Today we were joined by new friends. (flickr)

Friday's work was impressive, well done, it was evident that a lot of thinking, team work and discussion had taken place - keep it up, here's the follow up and requirements for this week - have fun, enjoy and go find out...

• Timing for this coming friday, 29th October, 2pm at the studio Aalto design factory
• Requirements to finish up last weeks
  
  • Link the diagrams/charts with a logic flow, that is describe what it was that you found, did, explored that led you/your team to the next level. Currently, there is great progression and there are some great leaps going on. So, now you need to think about and describe why you moved in a certain direction: themes, stakeholder understanding, methodology ...what influenced your group to make the decisions.
  • Upload last weeks work
    
    • Document on blog
    • Flickr upload for extra materials
    • Powerpoint/pdf to be sent to me, Aram and Amelia
      
• This week
  
  • Research - get into the field and do the desk work in china that is required to support your development
    
    • We will send  you a list of potential contacts via email : its your decision if you try to follow up with them. However, manage it well, assign one person in the team to contact a specific person, we will only expect a potential contact to be contacted by 3 people max, one from each team (clearly you can copy the whole team on the correspondence).
    • Assess what it is that you want to know, think about how this is going to help you, set  your goals and the questions prior to connecting with contacts
      
      • some thoughts for research do's/don's, this is not by any stretch of the imagination a full list, but it might be helpful:
        
        • be very clear about your objectives
        • document your process - photos, video, notes, pictures, chats plus...
        • When trying to understand behaviours and perceptions remember that discussion, chatting, observation, doing, following, interacting, offering to help! are all excellent ways to get closer to the real deal
        • Questions can be very specific or open: remember if you leave them open at the beginning you may be surprised with what you find - there may be a lot more to it than you currently think. Potentially very specific questions can be used as follow up, probing on certain areas.
        • Let the respondent answer the question in full, never cut them off or try to answer the question for them
        • if you have a certain area that you want to probe,try not to lead the person, so that they can only answer yes or no - unless you are giving them a multiple choice
        • if you want to test certain scenarios, then do this after you have had an open discussion
        • Certainly, if you are asking about "Facts", i.e. rules, regulations, schemes these questions are usually a lot more specific that behaviour and perceptions ..
          
  • There are two areas that i want you to focus on, armed with your new input and all the work you have already completed on themes and stakeholders, take this information and start a Multi cause diagram and try to define your project through a  root definition , system 'x' to do 'y' by 'z'.
    
• Have a great week!

Thanks for the great session last week.
This is our Flickr group, it will help us collect all the documentation of the work.  Please share your photos :)

http://www.flickr.com/groups/healthyhomesshanghai/

As we are conducting stakeholder analysis at the moment, I got to thinking about the differences between home owners and renters.  As the title says, food for thought.


Are home owners better stewards of the environment than renters and investors?  If so, why?  And how can that help us? 


Let's start with the example of renting a car versus owning a car. Your car is a cherished object, something that reflects you. A significant investment. The rental is not yours (and you've got insurance against damages, so do your worst) which makes it a resource and one that you want to squeeze the most value out of - rather than put value into.  It's a license for abuse. 

So it would seem that ownership or more importantly the sense of care and emotional attachment ownership evokes can be a powerful tool. My assumption would be that home owners, in general, make for more considerate and thoughtful inhabitants because they have a bigger stake in the long term health and quality of the environment.  They are more mindful of their actions. 

Mindfulness seems like a great quality to reinforce because it supports better decision making - what is the easy thing to do can be trumped by what is the better thing to do  - that's quite a good trick to have up your sleeve if you are trying to get people to make difficult changes.


Can we transfer that sense of care and mindfulness to things which are not owned?  Can you become attached to a service?  Can a renter cherish their home and thereby be better stewards of their environment? Maybe if we gave them a way and a reason to do it.




How might we transfuse some of the desired qualities (i.e. a cherished investment) of homeownership to renters? (ex: Collective ownership? Temporary upgrades?)


Or, perhaps even better, how might we provide renters with alternate paths to home ownership? (ex: Contests, ponzi schemes and lotteries)

from Susan:
Welcome back after the holidays and welcome to the sustainable design challenge and workshop...we are a little slow off the start as we have been trying to co-ordinate various groups of students.

Following a meeting today, with Lou Yongqi  we are now all connected, we have everyone on board and  the next meeting has been confirmed and is set for friday 15th October 13.30 at Aalto Factory Studio 4th floor.

You will find the Brief page updated with the course framework.  Please note there is some work required by the 15th of October. 

An excellent start to the research.  On the research blog we have two posts from Jonathan and Luigi that I found to be very insightful and thought provoking.

Jonathan highlights the lack of boundaries between private and public life found in many Chinese living situations and the potential in designing for a more communal living environment.

"How relevant is the social aspect in healthy home solutions?Then, if sociality is really that important, wouldn't be more effective to improve communal healthy living solutions rather than focusing on private ones, considering both the physical space limitation and the Chinese socio-political and cultural heritage, traditionally oriented towards shared solutions?"

Luigi's post continues this thread of public vs private and how expectations of the new generation of white collar workers are finding it difficult to attain the dream of owning their own private home.