Aiming to weave the social fabric among elderly people and the society by providing an interactive platform helping elderly people share their stories and preserve memories.
THEME
Weave the social
fabric
DURATION
Dec. 2018 - Jan. 2019
4 weeks
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
Prototyper
Illustrator
Video Director
TEAM
Ashley Bates
Ashwin Athlye
Naomi Lacy
Elderly people tend to share their stories by showing personal items. These items function as great reminiscing tools for elderly people to recall their memories.
Elderly people are reluctant and unconfident to interact with smart interface. But they love watching the screens.
Elderly people love interacting with and touching pets and babies. They enable elderly people to start a conversation with strangers comfortably.
We made an interactive toy dog named mimi and her doghouse located in the activity rooms of the senior living centers to gather the photographs of elderly people's items and the recordings of their stories so that their stories behind these meaningful items could be shown to people outside the centers and attract their interest. Our design enables elderly people to recall memories easily by referring to their items. Also, they are able to run through this simple and linear process smoothly by simply patting on mimi and following the instructions provided by digital mimi on the screen. Besides sharing their own stories, residents could also view their neighbors’ items and stories.
PROMOTING COMMUNICATION
Elderly people will feel more socially connected by passing down stories outside of the centers. Young people will have more empathy and interest for elderly people which would trigger face-to-face interactions.
HOMEY ATMOSPHERE
This new activity in the centers will help residents know each other better and trigger deeper conversation which will contribute to a more homey atmosphere. Living centers can also benefit from this because the homey atmosphere can attract more residents.
PRESERVING MEMORIES
This design help preserve the stories and memories of the older generation by providing a more inclusive social media platform. These memories are meaningful for both family members of the storytellers and all humankind.
At the beginning of the research phase, Ashwin and I came up with the structure of the interview questions. After that, I collaborated with my teammates to conduct 12 interviews. We switched the roles intentionally and I was the interviewer in 2 interviews.
After generating initial concepts, I found the commonality among our preliminary ideas which is that most of our ideas were basically a prompt for elderly people to share stories. Instead of picking one of them and moving on, I proposed to have another brainstorm which was looking back to the findings and thinking about three questions: 1. What specific kind of stories do elderly people want to share and are also meaningful to younger generation? 2. What trigger elderly people to tell this kind of stories? 3. What form we should use to present this trigger? Our final concept was generated in this brainstorm session.
Leveraging on my architectural background, I was in charge of the physical prototype and UI design of the digital prototype. Therefore, I ran the usability test. My idea of making a digital animated talking dog based on testing results was incorporated into our final design.
I also took charge of the video presentation's storytelling. I made a chart of each sentence of the script and corresponding scenes. This chart guided our final video shooting and editing.
As the Challenge section mentioned above, we want to bridge the communication gap between the elderly people in the senior living centers and the younger generation outside the centers. Therefore, we created this interview question structure to learn about the motivations, methods and artifacts of currently information exchange between the two groups. We also included questions about the pros and cons of the methods and the artifacts they might mention.
Based on this structure, we conducted 6 interviews with residents and 6 interviews with staffs of the senior living centers.
We summarized the main findings from the interviews and thought about how they could lead to design.
Based on the general direction we got from research findings, we ideated some rapid and rough design concepts of a physical device facilitating elderly people to recall and tell interesting stories. The ideation clarified which detailed datas we got could be further developed into insights which lead us to a more narrowed and specific solution space.
An interactive screen that enables elderly people to draw the picture of the place in the past by talking.
An interactive screen that lets elderly people share their memories of certain historical events.
An interactive toolkit that enables elderly people to compose their stories by placing tokens under the certain categories.
From the concepts we generated, we found they all function as a prompt for elderly people to tell a story. But they vary in three basic factors:
After clarifying these three variables, we looked back to the datas we got and sought for which related to the three factors.
● Stories that both elderly enjoy sharing and younger generation find interesting are about their personal memories.
● Stories about elderly people's personal memories are always told when they show their personal items .
● Elderly people loving touching and interacting with pets and little kids which trigger a lot of conversations between strangers in the centers.
How might we use personal items as reminiscing tools for elderly people to recall and pass down interesting stories to outside of the centers in an engaging and intuitive way?
Our initial concept was a toy dog named Mimi capturing the photos of elderly people's items and recording them telling the stories. Elderly people will be notified this new activity which requires them to bring a memorable item. Mimi will walk around the item to take 50 photos from different angles for generating a hologram projection of the item shown to the younger generation. In this way, the younger generation are able to see the item in the real world when they listen to the stories. Elderly people are able to run through this linear story-sharing process by simply patting on Mimi and talking. The video and text instructions are provided on the screen.
We made a low-fi prototype of our initial concept and conducted usability test with three elderly people in the center. We also conducted conceptual test with five young people to see their feeling of the design outcome. We got important insights from these testing:
Based on the feedbacks we got from testing, we iterated our design on three main aspects:
CAMERA BOX
Inspired by Humans of New York, a photoblog of street portraits and interviews collected on the streets of New York City, we changed the way of item presentation from hologram projection to a photo of the item and the owner's hand. Therefore, we made a doghouse-like camera box which enables users to capture photos by simply pressing a button.
ANIMATED AVATAR
During testing, some of our participants were not able to follow the instructions. In this case, we had to tell them what to do. Although what we said was the same as the instructions, our voice was way more acceptable for elderly people. Therefore, we created a talking avatar to provide instructions instead of using video instructions.
PATTING BUTTON
Finding that the participants were not confident about their input by patting on the toy dog, we thought we should add clarity and feedbacks to the current interaction. Therefore, we added some physical buttons on the toy dog since this is the interaction that most elderly people are familiar with.
We iterated our design concept and made a high-fi prototype for it. Our design aims to enable elderly residents in the living centers to recall memories and interact with the story-sharing platform easily. Knowing elderly people's interesting stories, the younger generation will have more empathy and interest on elderly people.
We used the iterated prototype of the final design to conduct usability test again with different 5 elderly people. Compared to the first round of testing, participants were able to go through the whole process more confidently and smoothly by following the instructions from the talking animated Mimi. Also, the switch from 3D scanning to taking 2D photos made it easier for elderly people to understand the process. After the testing, we received a lot of positive feedbacks from our stakeholders:
From the feedbacks of the participants, one thing we can refine on is the phrase we used on the interface. They think it will be easier for them to follow if the text is more conversation-like and inviting.
For future considerations, we speculate a system where stories and photos of the items would be edited by algorithm and displayed in a public setting. Viewers could get the contact of the centers and are able to visit the storytellers to have face-to-face interactions. Limited by the scale of design, we focused on the story collection phase and only provided one way of display, but the interaction between viewers and the displayed installation definitely needs more future research and design. We believe our design successfully functions as an important starting point of this system which has a great impact on elderly population.
When we try to intervene a wicked and broad problem space like this project, we are always overwhelmed by research datas which could lead to totally different solution space. To clarify a more narrowed solution space, we generated many rapid design concepts in group. This is actually researching by designing, so we didn't expect perfect concepts at this stage. These concepts just helped us to see which research datas had the potential to be translated into a design.
As mentioned in the Developing Insights session, we brainstormed multiple design concepts. However, we didn't pick any of them at the end. Instead, we analyzed both similarities and variables among them to clarify what further decisions we need to make. After that, we were able to intentionally look for certain answers from our data which end up with a better framed solution space.
Heartfelt thanks to the residents and the staffs of Evergreen Village at Bloomington and Brookdale Senior Living who provided tons of insights to us. Many thanks for mentorship and great feedbacks to Eli Blevis, Shaowen Bardzell, Matthew Fransisco, Ruoxun Chen, Dou Tian and Kailin Yang. Last but not least, I want to thank my teammates, Ashley Bates, Ashwin Athlye and Naomi Lacy, for the hardwork they put into this project. This was a tough but meaningful journey for all of us.
