DEAP 2019

Designing for Aging People

3 September 2019 – Paphos, Cyprus

Program

This workshop is structured to be engaging, practical, hands-on, and participatory in its approach. It includes plenty of time for interactions, discussions and exchanges of ideas — leading to concrete outcomes for its participants. The workshop program consists of:

  • 08:00-9:00: INTERACT Workshops Registration
  • 09:15: Workshop Welcome
  • 09:30: Paper Presentations (20+10 minutes each)
    • A Value-sensitive Toolkit: Bringing Values into the Design Process when Designing for the Elderly
      Mert Oktay and Hanna-Liisa Pender
    • The Sailboat Exercise as a Method for User Understanding and Requirements Gathering
      Paula Alexandra Silva
  • 10:30: Coffee Break
  • 11:00: A collaborative design activity: to explore novel approaches to design ideation and requirements gathering
  • 13:00: Lunch Break
  • 14:00: Paper Presentations (20+10 minutes each)
    • A Storytelling-based Approach to Designing for the Needs of Ageing People
      Elena Comincioli and Masood Masoodian
    • Breaking Interaction Barriers: Monitoring Elderly in Natural Settings Exploiting Everyday Objects
      Marina Buzzi
  • 15:00: Discussion
  • 15:30: Coffee Break
  • 16:00: Creation of a short video for INTERACT: to summarize the workshop and showcase the collaborative design activity
  • 17:00: Discussion and planning for future directions and outcomes
  • 17:30: Workshop ends

Abstracts

A Value-sensitive Toolkit: Bringing Values into the Design Process when Designing for the Elderly
Mert Oktay and Hanna-Liisa Pender

This paper gives and overview of developing a design toolkit for designers that would encourage them to keep the human values on the forefront, despite all the other constraints that need to be faced when designing new technologies. The toolkit was validated and refined in a series of workshops with designers and design students. The outcome of the work is a toolkit prototype that includes tools like design fiction, bootlegging and value review. It is intended to be used to compliment a human centred design process after user research to scaffold ideation and tackle design challenges related to aging in place and smart habitats for elderly.

The Sailboat Exercise as a Method for User Understanding and Requirements Gathering
Paula Alexandra Silva

To design digital products and services that truly empower end-users requires that design and development teams involve end-users early and throughout the design process. However, regardless of the wealth of methods available to Human-Computer Interaction designers, to identify tools that are both intuitive to use and allow for the active engagement of end-users, namely though co-design activities, is hardly ever easy. To identify a simple and straightforward method can be challenging especially when the end-user group are older adults. This paper proposes an adaptation of an exercise, traditionally used in agile retrospectives – the sailboat exercise – here modified and tailored to be used as a co-design generative tool for user understanding and requirements gathering. In short, the method leverages the analogy of a sailboat, and its surrounding factors, and combines it with a set of prompt questions, to create a shared understanding between the end-users and the members of the design team and to support identification of users' goals, desires, challenges and frustrations.

A Storytelling-based Approach to Designing for the Needs of Ageing People
Elena Comincioli and Masood Masoodian

Identifying users' needs is the basis of many design methodologies centred around a problem-solution approach. Ageist views of designers and older adult users themselves, however, negatively affect the use of existing methods for identifying their needs. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach to designing for older adults' needs based on storytelling. We introduce a method which uses a set of visual cards to allow older adult participants to tell their stories in co-design workshops. These stories can then be used to identify their needs.

Breaking Interaction Barriers: Monitoring Elderly in Natural Settings Exploiting Everyday Objects
Marina Buzzi

The European population is aging steadily. As a consequence neurodegenerative pathologies are becoming widespread, impacting heavily on social costs, so it is important to support independent living as long as possible, especially in the healthy elderly. This paper proposes an idea for advancing current monitoring technologies by breaking down the current paradigm and exploiting augmented everyday objects. Monitoring and behavior analysis can be exploited as triggers for motivating behavior changes in an elderly person. Thanks to progress in Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) one scenario is described to illustrate the proposed design concept. With a collaborative multidisciplinary effort, this view could be fast become a reality.