KoHaus - Digital Infrastructures
for Cohousing
Categories
Type
MSc Thesis
Credits
Aisteach Queer Housing Collective, Dublin
Context
This project is a site to support Cohousing groups in the design stage of a group housing development.
Cohousing is an umbrella term for practices like Housing Collectives and Housing Co-operatives. It's a social and sustainable approach to housing where communities address their unique housing needs together, rather than relying on the free market.
Problem Statement
Due to the participatory nature of the process, it can take years longer than mainstream development. They face problems with organizational issues such as forming cohesive vision statements, managing conflicts, and sustaining momentum.
There is a lack of societal and institutional awareness of this approach, and that there are other ways to having a home beyond the binary options of renting or purchasing property. As the housing crisis gets more serious in many places, Cohousing is not being discussed where it could provide a useful solution to this.
What shape could a platform to address the problems of Cohousing and its community participants take?
Process
As a Master's Thesis project, the design of this platform and hub went through an extensive process of research and design methods including interviews, surveys, workshops, and user testing. to read the full case study click below. The thesis is also published in the Swedish national portal of academic thesis projects.
KoHaus is a site which offers the dual functions of Cohousing Hub and Cohousing Platform, the former to market the cohousing practice and the latter to serve users currently in the process of setting up a cohousing project.
Cohousing Hub
Provides exemplary cohousing models from around Europe and allows cohousing groups to share their own content. This creates a knowledge-sharing ecosystem for both individuals interested in cohousing and groups navigating the development process. The Hub also serves as a way for individuals to connect with cohousing groups and for groups to advertise recruitment efforts.
Cohousing Platform
An organisational and conflict management tool, it helps the groups manage their activities, and allows them to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships. It offers integrations with all possible management tools in use today, as well as the following tools:
Vision Statement section to keep members aligned and visible
Notification Aggregator for all communication platforms to keep participants up-to-date
Task Management tool that assigns tags for cooperative work among members
Discussion Points tool for meeting agendas and raising dissenting opinions
Decisions Feed tool to track and acknowledge decisions made
Community Health tool to indicate community health based on discussion points, engagement, and decisions.
Interoperability
Each aspect of the service depends on the other. The below user flow diagram shows how certain tasks, such as a chat between an individual user and a cohousing group, depends on actors in each side.
Integrations
The below diagram demonstrates how integration would work in the case of the Cohousing group using Slack as a messaging service.
To make use of slack more accessible, it is synthesised into the general messages and notification feed provided by the cohousing platform. Providing this here eliminates the need for using multiple different communication tools as they can be accessed and interacted with in the platform.
