Website Devoted To Homeless Issues

Hi All,

Youn came across this website devoted to issues of homelessness. I would recommend that you use this website as a resource as you finalize your projects.

A Compelling Target Population

This article describes a study that determined 1/4 of the entire homeless population in the United States is comprised of veterans–which make up 11 percent of the total adult population in the States. This is the type of finding that can be crucial to articulating an argument to address this year’s CHI design problem. When you come across information like this you should immediately start asking questions: Why does this continue to occur? What is the problem or set of problems that continue to contribute to this ill faded situation for veterans? Does it look like homelessness will be a problem for new veterans arriving back from Iraq (in the short and longterm)? What is the root of this problem and why does it occur in the aftermath each new war? Historically, what has been done? Is this happening across the United States?  Is there somewhere locally that you could focus your efforts on or investigate this issue further? Do the problems that are happening locally reflect those occurring nationwide? If so, could you do something that would impact the problem locally, which could then be generalized on a much larger scale?

These are just some of the issues you should be considering when developing your design solutions.

CHI 2008: searching for the HSC Panacea

Ok, so there have been some important HSC developments regarding the CHI 2008 design project. Normally, if you are conducting research for a course grade and not planning to publish the study it is alright to proceed with the project without HSC approval. This is UNLESS the target population being researched is a “vulnerable subject population,” which the homeless in fact are. SO, this means that researchers will not be able to directly gather data about homeless people. This stems from a student question to the HSC committee about getting a homeless shelter employee to deploy a cultural probe with one of their clientele (e.g. a homeless citizen). One of the major problems in this instance revolves around consent and the possibility that homeless citizens will feel pressured into taking part in the study even if they don’t want to (which alludes to broader concerns regarding power structure and intrusion of privacy). Additionally, it appears that most research methods to directly study the local homeless population will be problematic from a research ethics/human subjects research regulation point of view.