Service Design Workshop for Social Housing

Client / Company: National Anti-Poverty Commission
Industry: Social Services – Housing
Research Method: Workshop

Objectives and Methodologies

Due to the exhaustion of the People’s Plan budget for social housing, the community organizations residing in danger zones will have to rely on the Community Mortgage Program (CMP) for the budget for their resettlement and housing needs. The National Anti-Poverty Commission engaged Curiosity to create and conduct a service design workshop for social housing. Using participatory methods to identify cost-efficient design considerations for post-disaster social housing, the workshop equips informal settler families (ISF) to optimize the P250,000 available budget. Allocated per family, this budget must cover land purchase, site development, and the building of the housing structure.

 

The Workshop

Creating the Social Housing Service Design involved several steps. Curiosity started with a review of social housing policies, programs, and processes. This included reviewing the People’s Plan Manual, Community Mortgage Program Policies, Social Housing Finance Corporation (SHFC) policies, and case studies from international social housing programs. Then, full planning for the workshop commenced, identifying key participants, objectives, and activities all revolving around the desired output posed through a Social Housing Challenge. The workshop itself was conducted over a two-day period with activities built around six major topics: Community Considerations for Relocation, Land and Budget Allocation, Housing Design Principles, House Design Options, “Mga Diskarte sa Housing Budget,” and Prioritization of “Mga Diskarte sa Housing Budget.”

 

Learning Output of the Workshop

Participants gained an understanding of the concept of Service Design as a framework that they can apply in planning for the material and social challenges of social housing, from a bottom-up perspective. The participants also learned the housing possibilities and challenges that accompany different budget levels, as well as learned about alternative, innovative, and scaled-up low-cost housing solutions from around the world. The participatory approach to the workshop aimed to mobilize the participants’ sense of agency, by equipping them with information they could use to negotiate the recommendations of land developers, as well as by facilitating discussion on the different strategies they can employ to address challenges related to land, income, materials, and policy. At the end of the workshop, the participants felt more equipped to negotiate and challenge the assumptions of the land developers they were dealing with.