Who?
The people using our design plan most broadly refers to young professionals who share living spaces with other people. We plan to do a contextual inquiry of people who work in the real estate industry, students who live off campus, recent graduates who transitioned from dorming to living in their own place, Williams facilities, and dorm housing coordinators. While it may be difficult to have a comprehensive contextual inquiry because a portion of our work will be virtual, we plan to take advantage of information overload by analyzing it. Examples would be with housing coordinators or Williams facilities.
Administration
The goal is to not only analyze the residents, but all parts of the residential hierarchy which includes people in administration that may provide insight unattainable from regular residents. Interviews with administration will involve their evaluation of housing situation based on their unique, such as room swaps and special requests pertaining to rooms (e.g. broken glass in the room that needs professional assistance) filed to facilities, or everyday problems residents may share with housing coordinators. A lot of this everyday information is reported via online group chats like GroupMe whereas special requests for facilities are made through a website form from 2009 that has technical errors which may dissuade people from submitting any problems to begin with. As a result, we can also analyze information overload, or in the case of the facilities form – possible information underload – from an administration perspective that can be incorporated into our project. These information records can be accessed and utilized for the purpose of our contextual inquiry to aid our evaluation of administration and their response/behaviors to this information.
Students
A large demographic that is affected by information overload includes college students who live off campus and recent graduates, due to the abundance of new information that comes with transitioning from living under an institution. We want to observe the way these individuals communicate with their landlords and learn about the ways they handle logistics involved with renting. This includes the way that they function as tenants under a contract, as well as the way they complete rent transactions. We want to ask them about their experiences thus far and learn about their greatest challenges. We also want to understand and evaluate what their communication with neighbors in their apartment complex is like. By observing logistic routine and asking focused questions, either in person or virtually, we should be able to get a good sense of what it is like to be a young first time renter.
Real Estate Agents
It is also important to understand the real estate industry when dealing with young first time renters in the market. To learn more about this, we would like to speak to real estate agents about their processes. It would be useful to watch these agents perform their everyday job to see the way that it differs based on their clientele. We want to ask them about their greatest challenges when working with young people who may have never worked with a real estate agent before, and even ask them about the aspects that these young people prioritize when looking for a new apartment. Going into these real estate agents’ place of work, where they are professionally skilled, will help us have the master apprentice relationship that is valued when performing a contextual inquiry.
These contextual inquiries will help us learn more about the problems that we foresee involving young people and the large amounts of information that they must handle when at a transitional time in their lives. We want to perform contextual inquiries with a large and diverse array of people to try to gain the most insightful information.