This past Saturday, our studio had a really great final review! Amazing job to all teams, and thank you to every one that came to support us, as well as our community partners and mentors that guided us in our … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: Final Review!
Over the past two weeks, we tested at a GED class offered by Houston Center for Literacy as well as with a current underprivileged youth involved with the Salvation Army who is looking to start taking GED classes. The questions that we asked at the testing sessions to the people taking/interested in taking the GED classes had to do with: their background, why they decided to take a GED class, how much they knew about the GED beforehand, and time commitments outside of studying. We also asked questions to the GED class teachers and asked them about: the knowledge … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: Test
We started our building phase guided by our how-can-we statement, “How can we promote the self-sustainability of marginalized individuals who lack a GED by focusing on their personal spaces?” We started our building phase by having a really fun and productive prototyping meeting to create a low fidelity prototype of our GED box idea. We split up into 3 pairs so that we can explore different areas of our solution. First group focused on how to motivate the user to work towards getting a GED, the second group focused on organizing the studying aspect, and the third group explored how … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: Build
After an intense reframing stage, we have narrowed down our HCW question to: How can we promote the self-sustainability of marginalized individuals who either lack a GED or have children by focusing on their personal spaces? We want our design to have low costs, be sustainable and help the homeless youth in the long-term, and be repeatable across multiple homeless youth. We came up with two concepts which address various key insights as described below. Concept 1: The Baby Box With this concept, the Baby Box directly addresses the needs of current mothers and expecting mothers by providing a … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: MSR + Ideate
In light of recent talks with the case manager at the Montrose Center for the Rapid Rehousing Program, we have truly been made to reframe or die. While we originally thought that we would be designing to give users autonomy over their own spaces to grant authority and development of identity, we learned that there are greater needs at hand. Janise, the case manager, told us that many of the current youths in the rapid rehousing program are either pregnant, have children, and do not have their GEDs. With this contradicting the steadfast underlying assumption about gender and identity and … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: Reframe
These past two weeks have flown by as we continue to learn more about our users and the complexity of their individual struggles to find acceptance and a lasting sense of community. By creating user personas and delving deep into research about rapid rehousing projects, every day we continue to be in awe of the resilience and courage of these people. In our weekly meeting, we were able to really get to the core of understanding the kind of rejection LGBTQIA+ kids face and the immense challenges they have to overcome both on the streets and in finding the love … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: IMMERSE
Houston is a city in crisis. The aftereffects of Hurricane Harvey pushed thousands more people onto the streets with nowhere else to turn. Of these individuals, LGBT+ homeless youth face a unique array of challenges in their daily lives where discrimination, rejection, and harassment have undermined the ability for many to find any safe community to coexist peacefully. Trying to address the issues of establishing a sense of community and security in these individuals’ lives proposes us the unique challenge of first, identifying the underlying causes of this rejection and then empowering those at Hatch Youth to be actively involved … Continue reading Team Homemade Pride: IDENTIFY