Team Reach
Empowering and strengthening the community of Harrison Hotel

Challenge 

At Harrison Hotel, staff want to strengthen the relationships between the residents, create a sense of belonging, and get diverse artists in, to organize diverse workshops and activities. On the other hand, the residents want the staff to ask about them and show them that they really care, and they hope to be able to go out and see the world instead of having people come in. 

Concept

Team Reach designed an interactive pin board that empowers residents by providing them a way of self-expression, and a two-way communication between them and the staff. The board is divided into 4 different sections, where residents can report their moods and feelings for the week and express their desire for any activity they want to do, and staff can celebrate the community of Harrison Hotel by posting pictures from past events and update the residents on upcoming events. 

Project Length

Team Members

4 months 

Skills & Tools

Design Research (Generative research, interviews, focus groups), Social Impact, Service Design (Illustrator, Photoshop), Prototyping, User-testing

Sylvia Nguyen Dang, Vishwajeet Sawant, Irene Ti, Anshu Tank

Project Advisor(s)

Sharon Green, Laura Weiss

My Role

Interview Facilitator, Design Strategy, Workshop Facilitator, Photography.
If you’d like to read my personal thoughts on this project, feel free to check my Medium article here.

Background Story

Harrison Hotel is an affordable housing community in Oakland, California, that provides housing for single adult residents with a history of chronic homelessness, including residents suffering from a disability (mental health, substance abuse…) and having experienced trauma.

Delivered Board

Based on the research featured below, we came to design an interactive pin-board that empowers residents to express their desires and feelings, and provides a two-way communication between them and the staff.

Research

In order to better understand the challenge and the bigger system, we researched LifeLong Medical Care, which Harrison Hotel and other residences come under. We also attended a couple managerial meetings at LifeLong and Harrison Hotel. In addition to that we observed the interactions within the hotel, studied the floor plan, and created a clay system map of the interactions within the bigger organization, which helped us visualize the different communication power-dynamics. 

In order to better understand the user's perspective, we started by interviewing several staff members from different managerial positions, because they were the ones who hired us and seemed to know exactly what they want us to do. Later on, we also interviewed residents who have been staying at the hotel for different periods of time (20+ years, 10+ years, and recently moved in), in order to understand both perspectives of the challenge.

Research insights:

1. The staff want to create a better sense of community among the residents: residents now consider Harrison Hotel as a shelter more than a home. They don’t interact with their neighbors and there is no sense of community in the building whatsoever.​
2. The staff want to bring the outside community in: They want to create partnerships with artists, students, restaurants, and
   organizations. They want their partners to come in Harrison Hotel and share their skills and knowledge with the residents.
   
3. The residents want to feel that they are cared about: They want the staff to ask them personally how they feel or if they need anything. They want more human contact, which they think is lacking in the current situation.
   
4. The residents want to feel human again, and want to be treated that way. They want to enjoy the simple pleasures: A lot of the residents at Harrison Hotel have never been out of Oakland. They want to go on simple field trips that would take them to the Fisherman’s Wharf, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Golden Gate Park.
   

Opportunity

How might we build a sense of community at Harrison Hotel
by encouraging everyone’s participation?​

Ideation & Prototyping

Based on the research findings, we designed a physical pin-board that would replace their old wooden board placed in front of the elevator. The board consists of 4 main sections (2 to be filled by residents, and 2 by staff). It also has a drop off section where residents can express their wishes privately. 

First section is an emoji feeling check-in for the residents to fill weekly. Second section lets them write down activities they want to do. Third section celebrates the community by posting pictures from previous events, which will also encourage more people to join. Fourth section is for event announcements.

User-testing

In order to test the first two sections, we hosted a "Lunch and Learn" workshop in the community hall. We invited residents to join us, have lunch, and decorate Christmas cookies together. We also gave them a disposable camera so they can document the moments and post the pictures on the third section of the board, once we mail them back the pictures. 

After user-testing, we realized that residents are much more comfortable expressing themselves with visuals or simple words, so the "wishlist drop-off" section was removed. Residents also found the emoji stickers to be small and confusing, and preferred to tick off an option from an existing list instead of having a huge array of options to pick from. 

Final Deliverables

We delivered to Harrison Hotel a high-fidelity pin-board with the four sections divided on it. In addition to that, we provided them with a Design Report and an Outreach Template that they could use in order to create partnerships with different organizations and artists. 

Learnings

1. Interview all stakeholders involved: Different individuals have different experiences and therefore bring different perspectives to a challenge. So a challenge cannot be fully resolved without talking to all stakeholders involved.
2. Consider sustainability: In the further iteration, we would reconsider the way that the staff would collect and keep track of the information they read on the board. 
3. Importance of communication: The issue got easily resolved by facilitating communication between the staff and residents who just needed a little bit more of human contact in order to understand each other's needs and feelings.