YOUR CHALLENGE:
“Redesign the experience of communicating with loved ones, for the elderly.”
OVERVIEW:
Many elderly people in the Bay Area and throughout the U.S. live isolated from their familiesand friends. Some live with their spouse, some alone, others in retirement homes, but only 15% of seniors in the United States live with their children– compared to 65% in Japan1. For some seniors, issues such as lack of mobility and disinterest or inability to use digital technology further cuts them off from social connections. But we know social relationships provide happiness, benefit mental and physical health, and add years to one’s life expectancy.
Your charge for this design challenge is to create solutions for the elderly that betters theircommunication with loved ones.It is also up to you to find out what “betters” entails. We ask you to engage with seniors and work to discover their feelings about connecting with loved ones and about technologies they may or may not use to facilitate this communication. You will come to understand the nuances of seniors’ needs and develop the insights that will set you up to envisionand prototype meaningful solutions. We will guide you through a design process to get you there.
This is a one-day design challenge to be held at the d.school on Saturday, April 10. We ask you prepare by doing empathy field-prework, to be completed before the morning of April 10. See how below.
THE EMPATHY FIELD-PREWORK:
The process to engage with people to gain empathy may be the most important part of this project and perhaps the best thing you can learn about design thinking. Spend a couple hours engaging with seniors, talking to them about communication, friends and family, and technology. Have at least a couple of deep and meaningful conversations where you reach good stories and your interviewee talks about his or her feelings – get beyond the mechanics and facts of the subject matter. Ideally you can also have someone show you how he communicates – for example taking you through how he uses his phone or writes a letter. [TW1]
Do your empathy work with your teammates. [TW2]You can work in pairs or in larger groups, but we suggest you have a partner with you as you interview; it can be very useful to take on different roles, for example lead interviewer and lead listener-note-taker. We will briefly suggest some approaches to empathy work in class on Monday, April 5.
We ask that you do not only talk to your own grandparents and other family members, and that you speak to folks in person as much as possible. Here are some strategies to find people to talk to:
-Wear your Stanford sweatshirt and smile
-Go to a drugstore and talk to people waiting for their prescription
-Find people at a drop-in community center or retirement center
-Go to a mall to talk to folks (and bring us back an Orange Julius)
-Exchange grandmas – you can certainly leverage your own relationships, but let teammates engage with them too
THE WORKSHOP, APRIL 10, 2010:
The workshop will run 9 am to 5 pm on April 10, and we will provide lunch around noon. Remember, you will becoming in with notes from your empathy work. From there you will unpackyour empathy work, synthesize the information and come to a point of view about the challenge, ideate solution possibilities, and then prototypesome of your ideas. The immediate goal is for each team to conceptualize and prototype one or more useful and meaningful solutions by the end of the day. The overarching aim is to expose you to a design process and have you practice some of the methods that should be useful when you take on yourNairobi projects.
(1) nationmaster.com
Photos (Creative Commons): flickr.com/lyzadanger and flickr.com/sashamd
[TW1]I like this framing. Well stated.
[TW2]This needs to be clarified. Are we asking them to form the teams they will be working in, before Saturday? Or can they do observations together and then we will form teams there? Either we should have them get teams together in class Monday, or do it on Saturday.