EAGER: SAI: Developing Effective and Culturally Appropriate Alaskan Housing: Performance metrics for future builds based on an interdisciplinary ethnography of past projects

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Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.This SAI EAGER award supports an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, educators, builders, and engineers investigating the successes and failures of past housing projects in remote Alaskan communities. They are working with local research assistants to combine building diagnostics, local insights, socio-economic data, and culturally specific housing design. The team is working towards the creation of a repository of designs and findings that is available on an open-source platform. The data produced from this study will inform and strengthen future Alaskan infrastructure investments, and the research methods will lay the groundwork for similar research investigations in dozens of communities. The project broadens participation in engineering through collaborative research activities, makerspace activities, and community engagement.The housing security crisis in rural Alaska, exacerbated by climate change and highlighted by the recent pandemic, places immense burdens on resource-strapped communities. While large-scale investments to address these problems may be on the horizon, there is a clear need for cutting-edge research and socially rich data on rural Alaskan housing to guide future projects and avoid mistakes of the past. This research project tackles this knowledge deficit with an experimental collaboration of experts and community members from inside and outside Alaska who are developing integrated techniques and ethnographically informed understandings of the infrastructural impacts that recent cold-climate demonstration homes have on the lived experiences of Alaskans. The research team is investigating the successes and failures of cold-climate demonstration homes in two distinct eco-regions (inland Brooks Range and coastal Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta). They are integrating ethnographic data with building diagnostics using human factors and engineering methods to assess the performance of construction practices. Data will be shared and co-analyzed during online participatory design workshops involving experts and community stakeholders who are invested in rural Alaska housing security issues. The community approach will reveal experiential knowledge of housing affordances, burdens, and expenses, and will result in a collection of post-design data related to housing security in rural Alaska. Data is also being used to develop performance metrics and guidance for future building projects in formats that meet the needs of communities or agencies. Taken together, these materials are providing content for an eventual design repository. Finally, the integrative methodology developed in this project lays the foundation for longer term research examining additional post-design sites. This project’s focus on the effects of the built environment on communities and the generalizability of the methods from the case studies will be replicable not just in other regions of Alaska, but in other appropriate regions of the U.S.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.