What I chose to make: I taped out an area on the ground that measures out an area with the dimensions of 8.5ft/20ft/13.5ft. For better visualization, this will be an outline of the actual space one would be living in, in the tiny home I am designing. I also had two different floorpans of the room done on my laptop with an easy floor-planning program I found online.
What I hope to learn: I wanted to see people’s reactions when shown the amount of space they will have to live in. Do they consider it a large enough space? Were they shocked because of how tiny the actual living space is? What did they think about my initial designs?
How I will go about getting this information: I ended up just chatting with people, first showing them the outline of the 8.5x20ft space, then asking them what they thought about living in an area of that size. From there, I showed them the 2 different floorpans of the spaces I created and asked them their thoughts on that.
What I learned, and what it means for my project: I learned that for the most part, people haven’t really heard of the idea of tiny housing. A few did, but most didn’t know anything about it. Both types of people however, thought the concept was cool nonetheless. Many people thought both designs maximized the amount of space to make the tiny home feel like a normal home. They said it had all the qualities that are in a normal house, which they liked. A couple of pieces of advice that were super important and helpful for me to think about as I revise the initial floor-plan is the amount of space there was for storage within the house. How could I create the most storage area with the space I had? I should run with the concept of: If it’s not being used, put it away to save space. Another thing I have to think about that goes along with this is the space of the stairs, or the stairs in general to get to the second level. How could I best design these stairs to make them easily accessible, but also collapsable perhaps?– so it’s out of the way when I’m not using them. Last thing: I need to consider my target ‘client’. I could potentially make a bunch of designs for different types of people/families, but I will only have time to build a model of one, so I should narrow down which that will be and focus my design more on that target.