This week Tarun, Sreejith & Brian spoke about the design for elderly.
The Presentation
The first one to kick off was Brian, he spoke about facts on oldest people in the world and how the life expectancy of humans as a collective is changing. He spoke about popular voice assistants such as Google Assistant and Alexa which help the elderly. A discussion broke out several times during his talk with Alzheimer’s disease and elderly people.
Tarun spoke about wearables and smart devices in the space. He gave the example of health trackers and a device that helps old people maintain balance. He went on to speak about the mobility and joint problems related to the elderly.
Last up was Sreejith and he spoke about technology that’s aimed at the elderly. He spoke about a walking stick that tracks the movement and has built in sensors. I remember speaking to him about a similar device while discussing his thesis project.
The Workshop
We split for a break and returned for the workshop. We all played a fun game called shell shockers which is like Call of Duty but everyone is an egg and the aim is to scramble each other. Post that we continued with the design activity. This week I was teamed up with Neasa, Josephine and Chenxi. Our brief included a persona a technology around which we had to design and intervention. Our persona was that of a 45 year old woman who’s name was Jo, she lives alone with her cat in Limerick and her family lives in other cities. She is fond of dancing and often feels lonely at home.
A short video of our discussion & brainstorming session-
Our scenario faced us with a unique problem. It said that a group of old friends is visiting Amsterdam and that we needed to come up with a service that would help them enhance their travel experience. The catch was that we had to write a script and roleplay it as a short skit later on.
We developed our idea after a bit of brainstorming and then moved on to create a script. Our final idea was that of a booth that’s placed in various places such as hotel lobbies and airports which helps the elderly print out maps (they might not have internet at all times), an itinerary, list of good restaurants and much more. The device would be integrated with booths that would be present across the city and help them in case they wanted to reprint some material. We then wrote our script that painted the picture of a couple of friends landing in Amsterdam and going to the hotel, thinking about where to go and what areas to explore. With each one of them wanting to do different things, they wanted suggestions, at which point they asked the hotel receptionist who painted them to the nearest booth. They went to the booth and asked for recommendations and in the end had a great itinerary to go around Amsterdam. To improvise we used a text to speech converter that played the computers voice and each of us assumed a role.
This workshop was the most unique cause it made us act and write a script. I believe that activities like these are necessary to expand a designer’s horizon. Designing for elderly and being aware is very important for us as a society and making sure that we as a society we are inclusive.
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