Shelter - Build a home for Scotland

Shelter is a charity working to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and bad housing. They are a leading expert in the housing sector providing a wealth of knowledge, information and services. In addition to this they undertake a variety of challenging work including lobbying government and local authorities to tackle housing issues.

The Scottish Government have committed to providing a home for everyone in Scotland by 2012 and Shelter asked us to work on their 'Countdown to 2012' campaign, to urge the Scottish Government to commit sufficient funding to build enough affordable homes to make the target of 30,000 homes by 2012 a reality.

We were tasked with developing a Flash based application encouraging users to show their support for the campaign by creating a home of their own. The application allows users to select a number of backgrounds, house styles, pets and extras to build their own home. Items can be dragged and dropped, allowing for a degree of customisation and flexibility and once complete, homes can be saved to both users' desktops and a Flickr gallery which lives on the existing Shelter website. The application also contains a countdown to 2012 and live stats showing the number of homes created and required by 2012.

Working in collaboration with Shelters' existing web team and existing technical framework we delivered the core 'Build a home' Flash application and a standalone application containing live stats and a countdown to 2012 for use within the existing Shelter website and within the Shelter Scotland Facebook page.

Since the site went live over 1,800 homes have been created, show your support by building a home for Scotland.