Himmerlands Boligforening

In my graduation project as a bachelor in communication and digital media specializing in interactive digital media in 2017, I wrote a project on the communication of Himmerland Boligforening with their residents. An app prototype came out of which can be seen below as well as an abstract describing the project in more detail.

In this bachelor project, the focus will be on the information dissemination between Himmerland Boligforening and their residents. To solve this, we will develop a concept for an interactive digital media solution, which can help solve the communication problem as well as help make it easier to find information regarding moving in and out. In this project the housing organization on which we focus, is Himmerland Boligforening, because they pointed out that they had a problem with communication to their residents. Furthermore we look at their value set, which consists of “codetermination”, “security”, “service” and “dialogue”. Out of these we’ve chosen to focus on “dialog” and “service” as this is where the problems seems to be, based on the respondents’ statements, an e-mail correspondence with Simon, a board member from Himmerland Boligforening as well as our own experiences. We’ve ended up with this following problem definition:

design? 

In the beginning of the project we’ve articulated our own experience with moving, through every member’s own autoethnography. This helped us understand where we had problems regarding our moving situations, and compare those to see if there was a pattern. Afterwards we conducted interviews with six different residents from Himmerland Boligforening. Furthermore we held a workshop called “fremtidsværksted”, for the same residents, so they could articulate the problems further, and come up with suggestions for a solution together. The data from the interviews was analyzed through the KJ Method, which afterwards was gathered with the resident’s suggestions from the workshop. The resident’s wanted a digital solution, which was easy accessible, always around and had some different elements incorporated that could help the communication, so we ended up designing an application. To help the design process we used Garrett’s model “The Five Planes”, as well as design theory from Tidwell, Ginsburg and Holzblatt & Beyer. In the end of this assignment we will deal critically with the various aspects of the project's content, such as our understanding, data collection methods, user-oriented approaches as well as the technical and economical aspects that should be taken into account. The conclusion of this project, it that the organization of the information exchange between Himmerland Boligforening and their residents may be thought differently and possibly optimized through an application where the user has the opportunity to interact with the product.