Second Design Session Follow Up

Neal | December 16, 2016

Hey Housing Insights team!

Thanks for everyone that came last night! All the sketches from last night have been scanned and I’ve put them in the ‘/mockups’ folder in our Github repo. You can view them on the Github website (the dec15-hacknight.pdf file is the file with all of last nights ideas.

As I said last night, our next step is to sift through these ideas, and turn them into a clear plan of what to build for our first prototype. Based on the Doodle poll, we will do this at a design session on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 6:30-9:00 at the NY Code and Design Academy (*tentatively confirmed). For ongoing work in the month of January, I’m proposing splitting the group into 4 teams (see descriptions below).

How you can participate:

1) [Most important] Tell me whether or not you plan to come on Tuesday. At the same time, tell me which team(s) you are interested in joining. Take 1 minute to fill in your preferences on this sheet

**More stuff: **

2) Draw more one-page design ideas before our Tuesday meeting, like the ones we did last night. Scan them or take a picture and add them to this Github issue.

3) Explore our data. 

Don’t know how to use this? We can help you get set up next time. Also, please don’t drop our tables :)

Thanks! I hope to see many of you on Tuesday; if you can’t make it or just want to wait to see the plan, I’ll be in touch re: teams before the new year.


Prototype Team:

We’ll use Google Slides and Tableau to make a fake (but real-looking) version of our proposed design, or potentially 2-3 different versions. We’ll show this to some affordable housing users and watch their interactions with it. 

General Data Team:

Responsible for wrangling and locating our data sources, making sure we can link them, and writing Python / SQL code to analyze them. Also can do some data exploration to find interesting stories. 

Location Data Team:

Writing code to do spatial-analysis related data. For example, this team would start working on putting affordable buildings on a map and calculating the distance to public transit, or find the other buildings within X miles. Most likely will do this client-side via Mapbox GL JS and the Directions API (open to alternatives), but could also use Python SDK if it makes sense.

Javascript/D3 Team: 

Setting up the core structure of our main page code. For now this will focus on the nuts-and-bolts part of the project that we will use no matter what the design, learning about using D3, and how we connect to our data.