Alleviating homelessness using technology and data.
I recently learned that homelessness is not just about the people you see on the street every day, but that homelessness is in fact a funnel that people fall deeper into as their situation becomes increasingly desperate. At the bottom of the funnel are the aforementioned group known as the "chronically homeless". The top of the funnel however, looks a lot different, it consists of people who might be couch surfing with friends, sleeping in cars or moving between motels. This group is known as the "hidden homeless". We likely encounter this group every day, at work, in the coffee shop, at the gym, but they look just like you and I so we fail to recognise their situation.
The "hidden homeless", at the top of the funnel, actually make up the vast majority of the homeless population. What's even more surprising is that this group overwhelmingly has access to technology, 90% have access to a smartphone or laptop with internet access.
The not-for-profit organisation I am involved with called Ample Labs (www.amplelabs.co) is working on developing chatbots to more rapidly connect this group with essential services. This allows us to get a better understanding of their behaviours, what services they use and how effective they are. This has two benefits - first by connecting the 'hidden homeless' with essential services quickly, we make it less likely that they will fall further down the funnel into chronic homelessness; secondly, it provides us with essential data that we share with cities to inform policy making.
The long term hope, is that by using data to prevent at-risk populations from falling deeper into homelessness we can combat the problem at its source and start to eliminate homelessness before it even begins.
Props to the founder for his foresight choosing a name that will perfectly position them for an acquisition when Tim Sweeney decides he's ready to go head to head with Musk and Bezos.
Obviously this data set is heavily skewed due to the fact it comes from loan applicants. Can anyone suggest a better, more representative source for net worth data by age, income, etc.?
The way art transforms over time is fascinating and can completely alter our perception of entire classes of art and culture. Check out ancient Roman and Greek statuary and architecture:
I'm basically in the process of pursuing this dream. Previously I was an architect in Canada where we did a lot of large scale wood structures using sophisticated computational fabrication techniques.
These types of sophisticated projects though were fairly risky for property developers making them somewhat rare. So I struck out on my own to try to develop a small business around the most 'automatable' work I could afford to get into - which is basically a prototyping shop that offers laser cutting and engraving of wood products.
We've been fairly successful with it, and so now we're starting to develop product customizers that allow customers to order custom work which we can fabricate on demand without having to interact with the customer in person (a major source of overhead in most custom fabrication shops). Here's an early beta example of one we're working on for the wedding industry if you're interested: https://www.instantcaketopper.com
Water leaks into cracks and cervices when its warm and then freezes when its cold. Since the ice expands and concrete has negligable tensile strength the cracks and crevices expand even further and the material begins to chip away and crumble.
I run a small company that specializes in digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing. We’ve been in business for about 3 years now with moderate success. During that time, the progress I’ve witnessed in 3D printing technologies has been extremely disappointing. Meanwhile, our studio’s laser cutters do 10x the business of our 3D printers.
When desktop 3D printing was hitting the mainstream media in a big way a couple of years ago, the message was about how the technology was revolutionary and you could construct anything you could imagine at the press of the button. The public ate this message up, while industry insiders knew it couldn’t be further from the truth - of course that didn’t stop them from riding the frothy crest of the hype wave, further fueling the public’s misconceptions about the technology.
In the intervening 2 or 3 years, consumer desktop 3D printing technology hasn’t improved in any meaningful way. Most desktop FDM printers (the kind you’ve mostly likely seen that extrude a thin bead of melted plastic), are no better than the early Makerbot Replicator launched in 2012. They’re still slow, fairly user hostile (require a great deal of maintenance/calibration to get consistent results) and have many limitations regarding the types of geometries they are able to print due to limitations in support material.
The machines available at the consumer scale just aren’t capable of making truly useful parts. This is why there is a glut of green Yoda heads, and machines collecting dust on the back shelves of trendy digital agencies. This isn’t to discredit the minority of scrappy makers who are willing to work within the limitations of the equipment for novel projects - but for the larger public there just isn’t a ‘killer app’ for this type of device, beyond plastic trinkets.
The industrial/commercial scale printers are certainly much more capable. But like other types of manufacturing equipment, the development of these technologies is slow, mired by patents and driven by stakeholders who have no interest in cannibalizing sales of their expensive product lines by offering affordable consumer versions at a fraction of the price.
There are amazing things happening at the frontiers of digital fabrication. Laser cutting and CNC machining technologies are becoming much more affordable and easier to use for a wide variety of designers and engineers. For most applications these types of machines are infinitely more useful than 3D printers. They are providing an avenue for prototyping, short run production and the mass-customization of products to segments of designers and entrepreneurs who could never have afforded them previously. It’s almost a shame that the crappy desktop 3D printer has become the poster child for a much more varied and robust ecosystem of digital manufacturing technology.
I can't seem to find a way to share the local/personalized results I get with others via link. Is it even possible/reasonable? Would appreciate any advice, thanks.
Thanks very much for the feedback from both of you. Some of it mirrors what we heard during our experiment. We're gradually going back over the website to clarify the communication of some of these points more clearly and fix some usability niggles.
As for the "gold", its something we would love to do, and we plan on getting there eventually. For now one of the benefits of using 3D printing is that we can fulfill orders on demand and there is very little cost of carrying inventory, using metals ends up negating this advantage.
We tried this just yesterday at a couple Starbucks locations in Toronto for our new lines of 3D printed jewelry (http://www.hotpopfactory.com/). It was great, because we could hone in on specific demographics that interested us based on the location and time of day.
For the most part we found people weren't actually interested in taking any money for coffee (we didn't go the gift card route, we just approached people in line directly). When we offered to pay some people actually found it a bit off-putting. That said though, when you approach people candidly looking for feedback on a project you're personally invested in, people seemed pretty generous with their time.
We ended up getting great feedback on everything from the usability of our website, to the desirability of our product and pricing. We even ended up finding a couple new customers along the way. I'd highly recommend this experiment for any consumer facing product, it can be a bit daunting at first, but when used strategically it can be far more productive then having your head down coding in isolation all day.
If you enjoyed this article, I highly recommend checking out the book Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich (director of Lockheed's Skunkworks). It covers the development of this aircraft and several others through some pretty gripping accounts of engineering during the Cold War.
There are definitely Makerspaces and Hackerspaces around to facilitate this stuff. I'm a member of one called Site3[1] in Toronto. We have a variety of milling machines as well as a laser cutter, 3D printer and a new DIY 3-axis CNC that we are putting together right now. Membership works on a monthly fee like you might expect, and each member is given responsibilities for maintaining the shop. I think there are equivalent spaces emerging in many major cities in North America.
I recently learned that homelessness is not just about the people you see on the street every day, but that homelessness is in fact a funnel that people fall deeper into as their situation becomes increasingly desperate. At the bottom of the funnel are the aforementioned group known as the "chronically homeless". The top of the funnel however, looks a lot different, it consists of people who might be couch surfing with friends, sleeping in cars or moving between motels. This group is known as the "hidden homeless". We likely encounter this group every day, at work, in the coffee shop, at the gym, but they look just like you and I so we fail to recognise their situation.
The "hidden homeless", at the top of the funnel, actually make up the vast majority of the homeless population. What's even more surprising is that this group overwhelmingly has access to technology, 90% have access to a smartphone or laptop with internet access.
The not-for-profit organisation I am involved with called Ample Labs (www.amplelabs.co) is working on developing chatbots to more rapidly connect this group with essential services. This allows us to get a better understanding of their behaviours, what services they use and how effective they are. This has two benefits - first by connecting the 'hidden homeless' with essential services quickly, we make it less likely that they will fall further down the funnel into chronic homelessness; secondly, it provides us with essential data that we share with cities to inform policy making.
The long term hope, is that by using data to prevent at-risk populations from falling deeper into homelessness we can combat the problem at its source and start to eliminate homelessness before it even begins.