In Good Company

The Challenge

By 2030, about 25% of the adult population will be over the age of 65 and according to polls, 90% of seniors want to stay in their own homes as they age (Semuels). At the same time, there is a severe shortage of home health care aides in America due to poor compensation, high turnover rates, and the stigmatization of being ‘elderly babysitters’ (Semuels). Meanwhile, renters in America are facing a ‘rental crisis’ with the average person spending 30% of their income on housing and a total of 3.7 million Americans sharing housing for economic reasons (Keene). Furthermore, informal housing provision has emerged as an increasingly prevalent strategy to address the shortage of affordable housing across the country where the provider exchanges shelter for household and childcare support and financial alleviation (Keene). Informal housing often violates lease agreements and/or regulation due to its evasive nature, which can bear more stress to the provider (Keene) or create hazardous situations for the guest (Stewart).

How might we design a platform to selflessly facilitate the exchange of shelter, companionship, property maintenance, housework, and healthcare support between America’s aging population and America’s low-income population, so as to fill the gap in the housing safety net, increase accessibility for mutual support, and integrate communities?

During my final semester of undergrad, I undertook this independent research and strategy project in order to familiarize myself with the complex landscape and identify constraints, dependencies, and reveal historical case studies. My research was advised by

Professor Chris Csíkszentmihályi

and the culmination of my work was a 37-page paper where I outlined my research and gave a parametric description of what the ideal coliving service would look like. Below is a summarized version of my paper, which you can view in full

here

(as well as the citation list).

Research

Throughout my research, my guiding questions were:

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Is it possible to create a coliving platform that uniquely formalizes and eases the process of finding informal housing for vulnerable populations?

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Would it be possible to connect senior homeowners with vacant rooms to those younger and in need of housing, while promoting the exchange of companionship, home maintenance, and home health care?

Consequently, I researched a myriad of topics relating to these questions, including but not limited to: the sharing economy, the state of housing in America, Scandinavian housing experiments, the cultivation of trust, and evasive entrepreneurship. In the following section, I identify the tensions, synergies, and contradictions between the different research sub-topics generated by the aforementioned overarching questions. This in turn highlights the complexities imposed by these questions and the challenges that may occur when designing and implementing a co-living solution with all the given variables at play. In the section 3, I provide a parametric description of what I believe the co-living platform should look like based on my values and historical case studies.

One of my research artifacts, the text tracker.

Define

I created a

mind map

to support my

text tracker

research artifact and to help me visually draw connections between all of my research findings, and later define the biggest user needs and problems.

An overview of the mind map.

Understanding the mind map

The broader guiding research question in the mindmap

At the center of my mind map (in the yellow square), I pose my overarching question that would help guide my research: “How might we create a platform that helps to facilitate co-living arrangements and the exchange of services for lower-income populations?”

Then in the black boxes, I identified broader research topics that stemmed from this question including: the housing crisis, co-housing, the sharing economy, online communities, loneliness as a health epidemic, the senior population, and support within low-income communities.

In the light blue boxes, I identified sub-topics of the broader black research areas. For example, for the sharing economy, sub-topics included: serfs serving entitled people, avoidance of regulation/evasive entrepreneurship, paradoxy of the ‘sharing economy,’ the Californian Ideology, and collaborative consumption.

Insights and findings linked to each subtopic in the mind map

Lastly, every box with a green outline represents some kind of insight or supporting idea to its parent sub-topic.

As I created the mind map, I identified many ways in which my topics and insights related to each other. Sometimes there were contradicting ideas or tension between two topics. Other times, there was a synergy between ideas that represented similarities and consistencies across research topics. I highlight these through the use of differently colored dashed lines.

The mind map helped form parameters for which I would have to keep in mind during the design phase in Part 3. Below I have listed a few examples of the identified synergies, contradictions, and tensions, and examples of questions pertaining to each relationship.

Synergy:

When ideas or topics simultaneously showcase similar themes

Ex. Behaviors that point out gaps in regulation / government support

Keene’s paper on the wellbeing of informal housing points out that the reason people resort to informal housing arrangements is because they have no other option (because they do not qualify for housing assistance etc.). This exposes how the American government is deficient in providing housing to all Americans. When I read about the sharing economy, I learned how evasive behavior shines light on the gaps in regulation because regulation does not exist/is not strong enough to stop the behavior. The presence of a behavior of one party can reveal the absence of control of another party.

Question: Would this platform be taking on a responsibility that is inherently the government’s?

Contradiction:

When ideas or topics are blatantly at odds with each other

Ex. Markets, Sharing, and Social Good As Uneasy Partners vs. The Californian Ideology

In Tom Slee’s book, The Sharing Economy, he expresses the opinion that the Californian Ideology contradicts the reality that markets, sharing, and social good have trouble going hand in hand. The Californian Ideology can come off as naïve and ignores the aforementioned reality. Many sharing economy companies were conceived with ideas of “community” and “sharing” but when market transactions are involved, making profit takes precedence, and these initial values lose priority.

Question: What are my platform's values?

Tension:

When ideas or topics held in conjunction may produce conflict

Ex. The American Dream + Boarding As A Social Problem

People are not as receptive to the idea of communal living since American culture puts a lot of emphasis on the American dream of solo homeownership.

Question: What are the main benefits of co-living that should be advertised to change public perception?

Affinity Diagramming

I used my mind map to help me identify the components of my design because it provided a good overview of all of the data and research touched upon. For each idea on my mind map, I extracted a need, insight, and/or surprise. Then I used these sticky notes for affinity diagramming and grouped them according to their natural relationships.

Examples of needs, insights, and surprises that I extracted from my mind map.

The final sort. I created 6 groupings which each representing one component. Within each larger component, I grouped once again and identified 1-3 aspects of the component.

Getting primed for ideation

Through my research, I was able to deep-dive into the deficiencies in the current housing safety net and ways in which current coliving/sharing economy solutions fall short in addressing the needs of lower-income populations. I also learned about opportunities for coliving to provide solutions to critical societal issues such as the loneliness epidemic, the housing crisis, and a rapidly aging population. This lead to me to be able to further flush out the problem statement to ensure I ideate on the right problems later on:

How might we design a co-living platform that, through the selfless facilitation of resource exchange between America's aging population and America’s low-income population, fills the gap in the housing safety net, increases accessibility for mutual support, and integrates communities?

Through the affinity diagramming process demonstrated above, I found that the main components to consider when answering this question are:

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Companionship

‍

Compensation

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Social Norms

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Accountability

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Profitability

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Security

Ideation

Design recommendations

Within each component are multiple aspects that I explore. In total I identified 14 aspects out of the 6 components. For each aspect, I give a background of it based on my research and then I provide a design recommendation pertaining to it. Here is an examples of an aspect from the 'Compensation' component and its design recommendation:

Type of compensation

Background:

When discussing the motivating factors to provide housing with informal housing providers, an exclusively monetary incentive is infrequently at the forefront of their minds (Keene et al., 2022). For them it’s more about helping guests get back on their feet, since many of them know what it's like to face uncertainty in terms of their housing accommodations. Additionally, informal housing provides valuable mutual support such as food, help with housework, childcare from their guests, support with health needs, and companionship. It’s important to remember that the reason many people resort to informal housing is because of the structural constraints they face and their inability to pay for what’s considered ‘affordable’ in the first place. Presently, there is no state where a full-time minimum wage job is sufficient to affordably rent a 1 bedroom apartment (Keene et al., 2022).

Recommendation:

I propose that compensation between the housing provider and guest can be flexible and mutually agreed upon before co-living. The only compensation that I would like to exclude from the platform is monetary compensation for shelter aka rent payments. My design decision is based on the desire to challenge current economic models (something many sharing economy companies have failed to do) and because of the desire to acknowledge the fact that the average American tenant is rent-burdened (Barnes & Melillo, 2023). I think it would be fair for all cohabitants to split utility and grocery bill costs. Overall compensation on this platform places an emphasis on mutual support such as home maintenance, cooking, companionship, childcare, and health support. Home health care is the ‘thorniest’ form of mutual support that would require responsible oversight and regulation to ensure the safety of the one receiving care. If the homeowner meets Home Health Eligibility Criteria, then their cohabitant must be a certified home health aide (HHA). I think the exchange of home health care (among other forms of support) for rent and vice versa is legitimate considering that the monthly average cost of hiring a HHA for 40 hours a week is $4,957 (Samuels, 2022), though many seniors do not need such intensive care as this so the cost is lower. Meanwhile the average monthly rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,495 (Zumper, 2023).