This week the Housing and Transportation group met on Sunday and discussed areas of improvements based on the feedback we got from the judges and our meeting with Professor on Thursday. There are two major areas we discussed: how to structure the final presentation so that we can make our solutions more understandable and how to integrate housing into our solution. First, in terms of restructuring, we want to introduce two personas from different backgrounds/social status into our presentation (potentially a middle-class family and a slum dweller) – we will contact two people in Vizag to get their detailed daily commuting information and make them anonymous. We want to explain how the solution works through their perspectives – how they change their driving routes, take public transportation, and receive rewards – and how it can positively change their commuting experiences and how they can benefit from the VizagOne solution.

Second, we brainstormed how to integrate housing into our solution. There are two problems we want to potentially solve in housing – how to reduce residential water/utilities usage, and how to improve slum environment since 44% of the population in Vizag live in slums. We want to motivate local families to reduce usage by giving them points – we will track changes in their usage and compare their data with the neighborhood average and reward accordingly. This solution also requires cooperation with other teams, especially the food & water, and energy group. As for the slum solution, we want to build smart government housing for current slum dwellers but are having trouble coming up with a sustainable business model – aka who will fund these projects and why the government would want to build these building. We decided to look into Vizag’s city master planning to see their current solution regarding slums and contact city officials for feedback.

For now, our solution addresses problems at three major areas: Transportation, including route changes, parking and traffic violations; infrastructure including SeeClickFix, which is public service e-governance channel; housing, including benchmarking water/utility usage, pledging, and government housing. However, we want to make sure our solution is feasible and were planning to reach out to local government. Currently, we are coming up with questions and will make the outreach later this week.

The Housing/Transportation Group

Gautham Kesineni, Isabel Viegas De Lima, Helen Fan, Avanishree Kanoria, Aridam Kumar