Three Months Inside a Community House
A community house in Helsinki works to reduce social exclusion among families. Who are the families it serves, and what do they need from it?
MethodsSole researcher end to end: a survey I designed, three months of participatory observation, and in-depth interviews with six families and local social-services professionals.
Key findingClient families sort into four archetypes with different needs of the house. I drew each one as a persona so staff could use them.
What changedPresented company-wide, it set off hours of discussion about how staff relate to client families. The client commissioned a follow-up.
Understand + Align + (Re)design
The storyWe House Meltsi is a community house in Helsinki, run by a startup working to reduce social exclusion among families. As sole researcher I spent three months embedded in the house: a survey I designed and analysed myself, participatory observation, and in-depth interviews with six families, sanity-checked with local social-services professionals. Families whose first language was neither Finnish nor English participated through digital translators and methods designed so language never gated participation. That constraint shaped the instrument rather than the sample: the questions got simpler and more concrete, and the interviews got longer.