Making sure the end user had an influence on the design they actually use!

What did we seek to accomplish?

“How can we support facilitators in leveraging prototypes to strengthen older adults’ ability to participate in PD?”

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Abstract

This thesis and research explore how Participatory Design (PD) suffices in supporting older adults to participate in the ongoing digitalization of the society. We explore how prototypes can be leveraged by PD facilitators to strengthen older adults’ voices in co-design. The research question addressed in our thesis is: “How can we support facilitators in leveraging prototypes to strengthen older adults’ ability to participate in PD?”

We initiated and conducted a comprehensive PD project at a senior center
in Oslo, lasting over seven months. The project consisted of two phases; the first aimed to establish a good foundation for design, and the second phase, consisting of two independent design projects, resulted in two functional prototypes; an anti-fraud app and a TV-remote. The app is still being used at the time of writing, several months after the project ended. Although related work points to the wide applicability of prototypes, we identified a lack of concrete actions facilitators should consider during the implementation of prototypes in PD processes with older adults.

Through two analyses of our gathered data, we have analyzed both prototyping as an activity, and prototypes as results of PD projects. Our main findings concludes in 10 facilitator guidelines for leveraging prototypes, acting as guidelines for facilitators to follow to strengthen older adults’ ability to participate in PD. Our contribution is a step towards the ongoing search for new ways to include older adults in the development of technologies.

The process!

Making sure we connect with the user and end up a design that answers the problem!

We completed a series of 24!!! sessions across two phases together with the participants across the summer and fall months! Initially we started with a series of seminars to truly understand how the participants understood, used and percieve technology they use.

A picture of how some of our seminars typically looked like, as well as the the poster used to advertise our workshops!

Phase 2, Doing more design things!

In the second phase of our project we focused on designing and developing solutions to the problems found in our first phase!

We decided to use AI’s powers to help the participants understand and find scam attempts!

This resulted in the following app:

Analyzing this crazyness!

As our fun developed so did our data and our job needed to analyze it all!

We used Miro to initally map out the whole project and structuring our internal files and documents accordingly into their respective “session”. We decided to structure it in a timeline to understand the consequences and series of consequences of how we structured and facilitated our design project!

Firstly used a deductive thematic analysis method and analysed different factors and themes found in our design process and prototyping activities. Our codes were derived from both related work and common principles in the field.

Secondly we evaluated our results from the process(the two products of the design process) to further understand the impact and participation the participants had on the results.

Combining the two analysis

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Our main findings!

“How can we support facilitators in leveraging prototypes to strengthen older
adults’ ability to participate in PD?”

We presented 10 guidelines for designers and facilitators for leveraging the power of prototypes in design!

The project gave both Snorre and me lifelong memories and experiences and we thank the participants for their great contribution and eagerness in the project and process!