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Shaping the future of mega housing complexes
The project partnered with the real estate company Seedland, and delved into the daily lives of people living in China's mega housing complexes; exploring daily life, pain points, and opportunities for innovation to envision a future where housing complexes transcend traditional roles. Leading to the development of the 'Binary World' concept, revolutionizing logistics in mega housing complexes through a harmonious coexistence of humans and robots.
BACKGROUND
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China is home to approximately one-third of the world’s megacities, cities with over 10 million people. China's megacities have been at the forefront of the country’s rapid modernization and urban expansion. However, this rate of urbanization and the sheer scale of housing complexes being built can put a huge strain on available resources and be detrimental to the quality of life for people living in the complexes.
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THE ASK
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In 2020, Seedland identified the need to deliver more to their customers than simply the construction of new apartments. With a leadership team that had extensive backgrounds in tech, they wished to expand beyond a pure real estate company and become a provider of a more holistic lifestyle offering, centered around the needs of the people and families calling its housing complexes home.
Working directly with the CEO and CTO, their ask was:
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Help us gain a granular understanding of what daily life is like in China’s apartment complexes.
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Understand current behaviors, patterns of use, pain points in today’s apartment complexes, and opportunities for innovation.
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Identify key development and technological trends that could shape the home of the future.
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Challenge existing assumptions around what a housing complex should be.
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Develop future scenarios envisioning these possibilities.
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This project ask was not trivial; it presented a number of challenges for the team, including:
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Chinese homes are a particularly private space for the people that live there; most apartments are not that big, and as such, most socializing is done outside of the home.
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Collecting true representative data from within these private contexts, in a culture where the separation between private and public is significant, required significant prep and negotiation.
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The real estate company’s apartments catered to a broad spectrum of wealth profiles; we needed to collect meaningful and representative data from each.
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China’s urban environments deploy an extensive amount of “Bao’ans” (security guards) who can often present obstacles when they are presented with a scenario outside of their day-to-day experience, negotiating access around the apartment complexes required an additional level of planning, consideration, and flexibility.
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The client's team operated in Mandarin, whereas the research was conducted in both Cantonese and Mandarin.
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Embarking on fieldwork is always filled with unforeseen challenges. Figuring out how to tackle a project request like this and guarantee an exceptional outcome is never straightforward from the get-go. It is important to embrace the ambiguity that will surely come but do so by placing our confidence in our methods, in the process and draw from our wealth of experience, and knack for adapting to on-the-ground changes.
There was an undeniable tension on this project between the client team's eagerness to discover technological solutions and our knowledge of the necessity to really go into the depths of the pain points experienced in everyday life living in these complexes. As a team, we negotiated this tension by exposing our client team to the insightful, meaningful conversations we were having with their customers. It is difficult to ignore the truths that come from people sharing their lives with you, allowing you a window into understanding the obstacles they face and the desires they have. ​
WHAT WE DID
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We identified five cities across southern China to run research: Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, Foshan, and Wuhan.
Building meaningful, trust-based relationships with participants is both an art and a science. Our approach emphasizes the utmost respect for every participant, regardless of background. Whether you are doing immersive ethnographic research or conducting an ideative focus group, our work was only good as our participants. Our approach ensures we speak with people who are engaged, people who have a story to tell and are excited to be part of our project. We don’t recruit from databases; instead we use our network and creative approaches, and then we screen and screen them before they are cast to take part.
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To an outsider, we may appear engaged in research, but in reality, we serve as the bridge between on-the-ground dynamics and the client's organization. In this project, our team immersed themselves in the lives of individuals in these complexes, exploring architecture, emerging technology, and business strategy. Our perspective, shaped by extensive experience conducting research across China, spanning various backgrounds and economic brackets. We brought to the table expertise in futuring, space design, and autonomous technologies.
The project included an inordinate amount of pressure - with the client’s intention of presenting learnings from the project at their CES presentation, the core team had just 6 weeks to conduct research in five cities, deliver meaningful foundational understanding of the target customer to drive the development design assets that could bring to life for the client team, future scenarios of life in China mega housing complexes. Having our design team on the ground with our researchers throughout the fieldwork was critical to our ability to speed up our synthesis process.
Speculating on future scenarios.
DELIVERABLES
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After an intensive research and design sprint, we delivered a futures workshop to the CEO and CTO in Beijing, where we highlighted the current lifestyle shortcomings of living in these mega complexes and what the future possibilities could be. The report and scenarios became the foundation of the company’s ‘Human Settlement – Smart Living’ project.
Our field research provided rich stimulus material for generating the ideas behind our future scenarios (the key is to skillfully intertwine these insights and ideas into compelling narratives that vividly portray and inspire people to envision these future worlds). Our 'Binary World' concept sheds light on the intricate logistical challenges faced by apartment complexes, some of which house over 300,000 residents. With the rapid surge in delivery services and takeout, these housing complexes often find themselves inundated with parcels, with packages piling up at entrances, getting exposed to the elements and prone to getting lost. The Binary World envisioned a coexistence of two parallel worlds, one inhabited by humans and the other by robots. Dedicated routes and pathways would be constructed, allowing both robots and humans to navigate freely without hindering each other. During the night, the complex would come alive with robots taking on the majority of the essential logistical tasks.
As with every project, we always reflect by asking whether our contribution was meaningful and what the likely outcome of our work will be. We believe creating future scenarios grounded in the stories and experiences of people can be a force for good, but that this is not a given. The assumptions of any client team can be baked into their product development in such a way that, unintentionally or otherwise, it enforces certain norms and futures. Powerful human stories born from real insight can act as a mirror to these assumptions.
Our envisioning of a binary world.
THE TEAM
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ZhouQian, Ivy Lv, Da Xiong, Kriss Taylor and, of course, much deserved credit to our client partners, along with a thank you to all of our participants.