Independent thesis Advanced level (professional degree), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
Sustainability is an important factor in many different industries and the housing
industry is not an exception. Especially when the housing is intended for students,
more accurately international students which ads on layers of difficulty in regards to
sustainability. Ecological, economic and social sustainability becomes increasingly
more difficult to achieve when providing housing for international students. Why
can be answered in many different ways such as cultural differences, different way of
life or just the question regarding the Ac unit or lack of it in Sweden. Akademiska
Hus is a industry leading company in Sweden for providing sustainable housing to
international students. They constantly work with question regarding sustainability
such as how they can make the housing more sustainable as well as keeping all the
involved parties in the process happy. They have therefore been researching new
ways to approach this question.
This master thesis focuses on evaluating a potential improvement regards to sustainability
question as well as keeping all the parties involved happy. The focus is
on finding how all matters regarding housing can be integrated into one application.
The areas investigated is (1) model of integration, (2) the approach for the system
integration, and (3) the user experience of the developed application that is tested.
The work in the thesis was divided into three parts. The first part was to find out
the problems in the housing today and the goals with the application, this included
research into the different fields as well as an external analysis. The second part
was gathering data by conducting user interviews with the intended users of the
application as well as testing the application on them. Data was also collected by
analysing the application and how it works in regards to the system itself. Lastly
the data was analyzed several times with the double diamond approach.
The results showed that an application such as the one tested could greatly improve
sustainability in the housing with the most important functions being messaging,
community, making error reports and having access to documentation in the library.
However, the application needs to be tested more in larger scale in the form of a
pilot test to make a more accurate decision to as if it is worth investing in.
2023. , p. 58
Integration, Sustainability, While label application, UX, Double Diamond, Student housing
Master of Science Programme in Interaction Technology and Design - Engineering