Diploma autumn 2009 | Supervisor: Simon Clatworthy/Una Bjerkan Heimstad from Zoot Design
SiO Get in touch doesn’t force participation but it encourages active collaboration, networking and information exchange.
The main purpose of my project was to improve the experience of living in SiO student accommodations and especially in Bjerke Student House, through new services based on people’s needs.
SiO Studentboligene is a company that provides student accommodations to circa 6.000 students in Oslo, in 13 student houses or villages. My interest focused on those apartments and accommodations where people shared common spaces.
A valuable part of my exploration has been moving to a Bjerke student house for a month. The purposes were to experience living there and the services SiO offered, to observe people’s rituals and behaviours into the building and into the apartment and to intervene using participative design methods to involve people living there into the design process. People have been very responsive and the main outcome from the exploration was that people sharing spaces have very different needs and this generates problems. I especially realized about the existence of two categories of residents living there. People staying for a short period and people living there for a long period. Both of them have as a main need to feel at home through belonging to something. For short term users it is important to belong to a new social network; Long time users, instead, need to belong creating a link between them and the physical space through feelings of control and safety.
The next step was generating ideas, which lead to some concepts. The chosen one was SiO Get in touch.
SiO Get in touch is a service that lets residents be informed and aware about the community living around them, gives them the possibility to get in touch with each other and makes them feel that SiO cares about them and is there when they need. The service also gives residents the possibility, through more awareness, to find similarities and to create a sense of mutual help between each other. It is divided into three sub-services. Every sub-service is related to a context. “my flatmates” is a mobile application and door tags that are related to the apartment context. “my neighborhood” is a physical board that should be placed in the mailboxes area of the building (in Bjerke) or anyway closed to the entrance. “my community” is a web-based application available for all the SiO student accommodations.