2023 Emoti-con Home | Past Events | Judge Login Virtual Emoti-con

“Landlord Tech”

Creators: Justin, Natalie & Edward
High School Students from CS4All @ Bronx Academy for Software Engineering
Landlord Tech

About this Project:

Landlords constantly surveil tenants - but who is surveilling the landlords and making sure they are not up to dubious things? Landlords are often not required to notify tenants when they install new surveillance systems in their buildings. As part of our research to “flip the gaze” on landlords, we are mapping where landlord tech and surveillance systems are being installed in New York City and San Francisco. That's where we come in! We want to make a data spreadsheet and/or a map showing where several landlord tech companies have installed facial recognition cameras and other surveillance systems. The data could be paired with photographs documenting what has been installed. Our team has created GANNT charts, Logframes and used sources such as Open Data to optimize effort and utilize useful data.

Project Media

Images

Screen Shot 2021 05 05 at 11 42 47 AM

Slides

Share this project:

Community Feedback:

👾 
Fun
🚀 
Innovative
🌎 
Helpful
🌈 
Great Design
💡 
Makes Me Think

Feedback from the Judges:

Joe Chung
👏 MFA Design and Technology Student at Parsons School of Design — Emoti-Con Judge
Kudos to you for addressing a problem that has deep implications for the lives of many!

Great efforts in really getting to understand the problem space, and going for both a user-centered as well as a big data approach! I love how you have considered many different perspectives in your stakeholder analysis, and how you have gotten your audience thinking about these issues in the first couple of slides in your pitch, in a deeply personal way.

As you have done, speaking with experts who are well versed in can be incredibly useful in understanding what has been done before, what worked, what hasn’t and what are the untapped opportunities. I would also love to hear what the other stakeholders have to say, like how they addressed situations when they were unfairly discriminated against.

All in all, very good effort, and I look forward to seeing how you deliver all this good research into the hands of those who need it most, in a way that they can use to address such abuses in surveillance technologies!

Eddie Palacio III
👏 Admissions Counselor at University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design — Emoti-Con Judge
This project is a great niche that is in need of social awareness! It is highlighting power dynamics, classism, policy discrimination, and privacy issues. I would love to see how this project can go beyond awareness and move into resolution for the communities you're attempting to support with this project. I appreciate the spreadsheet, as data and research is important steps towards policy change. I think this project (as it progresses) can be used as evidence for the need of policy change and violation of constitutional rights. Great work!

Dan Mehaffey
👏 Senior Account Executive at Microsoft — Emoti-Con Judge
You've hit on a really interesting problem space here! Landlords have a lot of power over their tenants. As someone who has had some pretty dubious landlords before I can certainly agree that as a tenant you're well being is certainly vulnerable in certain scenarios.

I really like your process for Data collection and analysis. You are clearly following good Data principles and have documented your process cleanly which is really important for proving your hypothesis and making sure your findings are accurate.

I think you have innovatively reframed a challenge and are trying to put the power back in the hands of the people. At the very least there should be awareness and consent that these practices take place.

Things to consider:
- I love your focus on data. Could you expand your data sources to include financial, review data of landlords / brokers so that consumers can see which landlords have good or bad practices? This could include whether rents suddenly hike up, or whether they have been reported in the past for bad practices.
How will the user interface with the spreadsheet? Will their be a UI for them to click around and drill down into the data? Have you considered using Dashboards to visualize your data

Feedback from the Community:

👏 a Middle School Student
I love your idea and I find this can be useful if the government allows it . Although as whole this idea is amazing and i really like it.