The Tenderloin, SF, CA
The Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California, is a unique urban anomaly, home to the highest concentration of youth, seniors, social service agencies, and single room occupancy within city limits. It remains one of the last affordable places to live within San Francisco, with more than 30% of local real estate reserved for permanent affordable housing.
My thesis interrogates the affordable housing development process, how ethnographic research methods may be employed to gather pertinent user-centered information, and how to utilize this information to inform design strategies that benefit vulnerable populations. I argue in favor of design as a tool to empower and amplify the voices of its users: residents seeking or living in affordable housing.
Through my thesis, I urge all designers working with vulnerable populations to reevaluate community engagement policies and look to ethnographic research to transform community design from the ground up --both literally and figuratively. Community is not an end product, nor a consideration, it is the raw material from which seeds of invention are planted and can prosper.
The merits of observational science span centuries, and ethnography’s potential to supplant current methods of top down community engagement efforts are unparalleled. Through my thesis, I urge all designers working with vulnerable populations to reevaluate community engagement policies and how ethnography can transform community design from the ground up --both literally and figuratively. Ethnographic research is the “scaffolding” around which communities can take the reins and human-centered design can flourish. In order for this process to take hold, space and place must be considered not as disparate, but as one and the same, where place/space is the mediator of human-environment interaction.