HOMIES

MSc thesis project

2024 / 7 months

MSc thesis project

2024 / 7 months

problem

88,000 off-site students in Milan rely almost entirely on a private rental market full of malpractice and misinformation. 65% experience housing problems, but fewer than 1% can rely on university support (StudMiHome).

solution

A peer-to-peer service system connecting students with verified information, experienced peers, and improved university services, structured across three levels: Connect, Support, Empower.

my role

Solo designer and researcher. I came to this project as someone who had lived through these problems firsthand, which shaped every research and design decision.

problem

88,000 off-site students in Milan rely almost entirely on a private rental market full of malpractice and misinformation. 65% experience housing problems, but fewer than 1% can rely on university support (StudMiHome).

impact

Concept validated with students, institutions, the Municipality, and tenant unions. A working platform prototype was built and tested with real users.

Milan's student housing crisis is the result of decades of reduced public investment, housing financialization, and the rise of short-term rentals. I mapped these causes from the global level down to Milan, where rents rose nearly 34% in less than a decade after Expo 2015. Then I interviewed 11 local stakeholders: housing experts, unions, universities, and associations, to understand what support structures already existed and where they fell short. In parallel, I participated in StudMiHome workshops with students to hear their experiences.

The journey map puts in relation what students go through, when housing decisions happen, and what universities offer. Most services are concentrated after arrival, but the most critical decisions happen before, sometimes with as little as 15 days. Existing peer support services are run by students without proper training or verified information. HOMIES was designed to address these gaps: continuous informational support before and during the search, improved university services built on distributed student knowledge, and an iterative mentorship cycle where experienced students support the next wave.

Eleven opportunity spaces came out of the research. I brought them into a co-design workshop with eight students, who helped prioritize and define the concept direction. Four areas of intervention emerged: support students before they arrive, enable peer knowledge sharing, rebuild trust with universities, and reach international students specifically. These became the structural logic of HOMIES.

HOMIES is delivered through four touchpoints. The website acts as a central knowledge hub with verified housing guides, legal information, and resources for universities. The platform is a verified-only student community for peer support, mentorship, and roommate matching. Social channels keep students informed between touchpoints. On-campus spaces make the service physically visible where students already are. The platform was built as a working prototype using Flarum, an open-source forum tool, with governance rules, user roles, and moderation logic. The website was prototyped in Figma and tested in a roleplay session with four students before validation.

The final map shows how a student moves through the system: from first contact before arriving in Milan, through the website and platform, into the mentor community, and eventually becoming a Homie Mentor themselves. That iterative cycle, where students who were helped become the ones doing the helping, is what makes the service sustainable without depending entirely on institutional resources. 

Housing precarity is a systems problem, and systems problems have loops. Every cause feeds another: financialization raises rents, rising rents push students into informal markets, informal markets enable malpractice. Understanding those connections changed how I framed the design opportunity, from fixing a service to shifting a dynamic.