40x

Background

New York is becoming progressively more unaffordable.

A bit of renter’s trivia we found especially interesting is the 40x rule, which states you must make forty times the monthly rent per year in order to qualify to rent an apartment. The 40x rule leads to a stark contrast between neighborhood rents and the median household incomes of the neighborhood’s inhabitants.

Research

We found that the neighborhoods that were most severely unaffordable were not those with the highest rents, but rather those where the median household income was low. Neighborhoods that were classified as “more affordable” actually had higher rents, but the inhabitants of those neighborhoods had higher median household incomes and thus could more easily afford to pay. We used data from Statistical Atlas, Census Reporter, NYC.gov, Data USA, and several rental sites to calculate our statistics.

Ideation & Prototyping

We were drawn to augmented reality as our medium because it allowed us to intervene in a public space while maintaining respect for the residents of that space, and also could exist in perpetuity.

We chose to illustrate the displacement caused by the 40x rule by showing people disappearing from their neighborhoods as they are priced out. We started out by making a high-fidelity prototype in Adobe XD.

Once we user-tested the experience, we moved on to building the visualization in Unity using Vuforia plane tracking. We made the decision to leave in the outline of the priced-out residents, as it made the visualization more stark.

Final Design & Expansion

Our original visualization used world-scale AR and was recorded physically in the Lower East Side.

Upon our project being accepted into the ITP Winter Show, we decided to build a complementary tabletop AR demo for the project using a map of the Lower East Side as the image target.

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

We gained some important insights from our user testing at the ITP Winter Show and were able to make iterations and plan for future improvements:

1. People touched the screen throughout the experience, which could disrupt the flow of the animation, so we made UI elements active only during certain parts of the overall experience.

2. Because people expected immediate responsiveness of mobile experiences, we sped up the animation of the AR figures disappearing, in order to better capture the attention of the user.

3. Most people are unfamiliar with AR, and required guidance on how to launch the initial animation. Moving forward, it would be helpful to have instructions on the initial screen to help orient users to how to start.