Improving the sustainability in student housing with digital integration

Abstract: 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.