Focus Group Meetings – The beginning of Co-Designing
Residential building constructors rarely ask future tenants what kind of home would serve their needs the best. If there are no proper spaces where people can easily mingle, they won’t be able to make connections. Social sustainability can only evolve if people are surrounded by a strong, meaningful community. Members of this community can support each other in their daily routine (e.g. cooking, childcare, housework…etc) but they can also perform their recreational activities together (celebrating, chatting, playing, doing sport…etc) and in this way fight against the growing problem of loneliness.
In E-CO-Housing the new tenants will be people who are in need of social housing. In order to get the economic sustainability right we have to help them succeed in this area of their life as well. Having a big open space in the new building where they can start their own business or enable them even to barter their products can help them move up on the economic ladder.
Our experts are devoted to help them succeed in all of the above. That is why the first and most important task is to understand the needs of the future tenants.
Three focus group sessions have been organised in February 2019 where 15 locals from Zugló were invited. People in this group were selected to simulate the variety of the group of future tenants. On these meetings we wanted to understand their daily routine, what their expectations would be towards their home/house, what they think about community and how they would like to take part in it.
It has been verified by the participants that they would be really motivated to become a member of this kind of E-CO community and they would be extremely glad to share their everyday troubles with each other. They have managed to define together the desired distribution of premises in the apartments as well as the function, size and location of commonly used spaces in the new building.
The effective drawing of plans by our architectural designer partner has started based on the feedbacks collected.
Stay tuned for more updates on how it turned out in our next news!
Housing
