Team Tools for the Homeless: REFRAME

This week, our team met to reframe our project!

2 key insights that are driving our design process forward are:

  1. There are many short-term solutions to water scarcity (boy scout troops, volunteers, etc.), but few long term solutions in Houston
  2. Limited access to water affects the homeless in ways more than just dehydration, most notably affecting hygiene (ability to brush teeth, wash hands, shower, etc.) and while Star of Hope hands out hygiene bags, many of the items are unusable without water

During this meeting we also established a few overarching short and long term measures of success based on these insights.

Medium term MOS:

  • We are able to test idea on run with Kenneth
  • Every homeless individual is willing to consider our solution

Long term MOS:

  • Every homeless individual in the tent city we address has access to water

We also established a few design goals that we would like for our solution to contain:

  • Something that you don’t have to carry or would be easy to carry/lightweight
  • Sustainable – should be able to use more than once
  • Cost-effective enough to reproduce
  • Accessible/easy to distribute
  • Sanitary / in alignment with good hygiene

Based on these design goals, we then developed specific measures of success for each one:

  • Easy to carry – can put it in a grocery bag / backpack or push
  • Sustainable – the design can last for more than three months in different weather conditions
  • Cost-Effective – the average cost per person is less than 75 cents
    • The total cost of implementation is less than $300
  • Accessible – it takes less than ten minutes to get water / you can have access to water every day
  • Sanitary – it makes 0 people sick

Finally, to end our meeting we brainstormed to reframe our original HCW of “How Can We design a tool for homeless individuals in Houston to improve their hygiene?” to “How can we ensure homeless individuals in Houston’s tent camps have reliable access to the water needed to maintain good hygiene?”

This week, we were also able to go on a distribution run with Kenneth at Star of Hope.  Kenneth said that he goes on 3-4 of these a day, passing out premade hygiene kits to the homeless.  These hygiene kits are either donated or put together by volunteers.  While passing out the hygiene kits, we were able to interact with a few of the homeless individuals.  We found that there is a water fountain a few blocks from the entertainment site that we visited, but we were not able to visit it to see if it was even working/maintained.  We confirmed that access to water is an issue for them, and may try to focus in on these possibly unmaintained water fountains as a possible problem space.

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