Co-Design With Older Adults: Examining and Reflecting on Collaboration with Aging Communities
Overview
Co-design methods have involved older adults in the design process to fill the knowledge gap that younger adult designers might encounter when designing for an aging population. A focus of co-design means establishing equal and equitable relationships between users and designers. To understand the factors that contribute to equal collaborations between older adults and student designers, we conducted 12 co-design sessions with 16 older adults and 11 student designers. We examined their interactions by adapting a framework initially aimed to understand the child-adult design partnership. We also analyzed student designers' reflections to understand their experiences and learnings from designing with older adults. Our findings demonstrate that developing a design partnership is complex. The framework helped surface factors like sharing life experiences and role ownership that influenced balanced or unbalanced interactions. Through the student designers' reflections, we found that student designers identified challenges they encountered and the assumptions they had about the older adult population. We believe that immersing students in a co-design experience with older adults and leveraging reflection activities provides an educational and meaningful experience to the design students.
Category
Research Article
Timeline
Jan 2020 - Jan 2021
Collaborators
Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang, Jay L Cunningham, Wendy Roldan, Jason Yip, Julie A Kientz
Organization
UW HCDE
What might intergenerational design collaborations do for aging adult users of health technologies?
Participatory design (PD) approaches have been a way to ensure that technologies better meet the needs of older adults and push against the assumptions about their abilities to contribute creative ideas. Prior studies in PD approaches and co-design approaches have included older adults in a range of design activities, including expressing their needs and creating and evaluating prototypes. Sharing the design process with people who may use technology is essential to PD approaches and the co-design approach, and researchers have provided frameworks, considerations, and lessons learned to facilitate successful collaborations with older adults. However, such as when facilitating, building rapport, and collaborating between older adults and designers remains an area of need to facilitate equal and equitable collaboration during design activities. The distinct differences between older adults and designers are often their ages and life experience. This gap can influence team dynamics and participation, so it is important to identify and understand aspects that contribute and distract from building a design partnership. While explorations in equal and equitable design have taken place with children e.g., fewer studies are available to make sense of the dynamic collaborations between designers and older adults.
Study Overview
Our study aimed to address that gap by understanding the interactions between older adults and younger adult student designers in a series of co-design activities. We also wanted to understand student designers’ experience in co-designing with older adults.
This paper addresses three research questions:
What types of interactions occur during co-design with older adults and student designers?
What types of activities lead toward balanced or unbalanced interactions?
How might co-design sessions impact student designers’ perceptions of designing with older adults?