Winter 2002

UTOPIA Newsletter 2

The UTOPIA newsletter is produced by the UTOPIA consortium, a group of Scottish universities working towards the design of usable technology for older people. If you would like to be removed from our newsletter list please contact us at the address on the back page.

“Design for us and you design for everyone!”

One of the aims of the UTOPIA project is to tell businesses that they need to design technology that older people want to use - which might mean larger print on buttons, or games that older people enjoy. We ran two workshops for industry people at the beginning of November, one in Edinburgh and one in Dundee.

There were various talks covering topics like the law on accessible website design and how to design usable websites, but the star of the workshops was Mrs Isobel Lindsaywho told the industry representatives to design for her and others her age. If technology was more usable for older people, she argued, it would be more usable for everyone. Mrs Lindsay talked about the ways in which she had started to use computers and the way she uses them these days (everything from shopping online at Tesco to booking flights). Her presentation was undoubtedly the most popular of the day and she became a local media sensation with articles in the Evening Telegraph, the Press and Journal and the Courier!

Mrs Lindsay at the UTOPIA workshop in Dundee, photograph courtesy of The Courier.

The UTOPIA team would like to thank Mrs Lindsay for all her help and support.

Another person we would very much like to thank is Chris McKinley. Audrey Syme and Oli Mival went to interview Ms McKinley on use of technology and filmed her talking about technology and the way she uses it. Video excerpts from their discussion were shown at the industry workshops and thoroughly impressed the delegates who responded with tremendous interest to seeing the ways in which Chris used her phone and her computer.

Chris McKinley and her computer

More Than Sweets

- Lachimi Tiwari

I live over 10,000 miles away from home. I remember when mum had a small problem with the computer. I tried to explain to her how to solve it over the phone. She didn’t understand what I was saying.

Recently, a friend of mine introduced me to something called MSN Messenger, a chat messaging software, which allowed me to:

1Talk to him by typing out words

2Have a free conversation with him if we both had a microphone

3See him if we both used a webcam

4Share a whiteboard which we could both draw on together and see what we were doing

5Exchange files upto a certain size

6Take control of each other’s computer (if we gave each other permission!)

Feature 6 was what I had been looking for all along. I went home and installed MSN Messenger on mum’s computer and taught her how to use it. She still has trouble using it sometimes but we talk the problems through on the microphone and I can see and hear her. The best thing is that the last time she had a problem with the computer, I took control of the computer at home and fixed the problem for her. We saved so much on the phone bills. Isn’t technology amazing!

That was what gave me the idea (and speaking to everyone I have come into contact with at the various community centres, stroke groups, volunteers etc.) for what we’re thinking of creating here at Abertay University, something like MSN Messenger which allows us to show you how to use new kinds of technology you may not be familiar with. We hope this will encourage all of you out there to try out new technology if you haven’t done so already!

Finding the way

- Joy Goodman

Have you ever been in an unfamiliar town and had no idea how to get toyour destination? Everyone gets lost sometimes. But some older people mayfind it harder as their eyesight and memory become lesssharp than they used to be. We at Utopia in Glasgow are hoping to helpout in these kinds of situations by developing hand-held devices to givedirections and information about the locality. But we can't do this alone - we need yourhelp. Starting in January we're hoping to run some interviews witholder people to find out what kind of navigation information theywould find most helpful and what they would like from a navigationaid. If you are interested in taking part, please get in touch.You can phone Joy Goodman on 0141 330 3541 or write to: Joy Goodman, Department of Computing Science, Glasgow University, GLASGOW G12 8QQ.