Macro Unit Week Four
Brief: Design a way for people to manage complex risk together
Methods: Directed storytelling
Team: Mo Bekkouri, Roshni Suri, Yanxu Chen, myself
Week four on the Macro project was a pivotal point in the design process for us as a group, influenced by the people we had met, the realisations this caused, and the advice we received, resulting in yet another review of our project proposal and more hesitation to proceed.
It was unfortunate that the meeting at Age UK had been delayed by a week, however we took this as an opportunity to review our design proposals with the older people. Our conversations with them were informative, however we had overestimated how much they would understand of our project and proposals and therefore we reduced our conversations back towards primary research again.
The lovely people at an Age UK lunch. Shared with permission. Photos by Roshni Suri
We also spent time with a staff member from Age UK, who gave us some helpful insights.
A staff member at Age UK. Shared with permission. Recording by Roshni Suri, clips assembled by author.
With this new data, it was impossible to ignore the overwhelming evidence that technology wasn’t going to be a part of the older people’s lives if they didn’t want it, and to continue to progress with this wouldn’t be beneficial to them.
Given our original ‘complex risk’ had been technology based, we were unable to progress until we had redefined the brief again. The next move was to de-centre technology, and focus on what was left. Loneliness had come up in our research as an effect of not being digitally connected, so this was the route we followed.
Meeting with John aided us in identifying the complex risk associated with loneliness, recommending that we seek academic research to give ourselves a theoretical grounding to move forwards from. Papers by Klinenberg (2016), Holt-Lunstad et al (2015), and Jaremka et al (2014) confirmed the risk of loneliness to health.
We had a direction to proceed, but there was confusing element to the conversation by the terms used by John:
How do you insure against loneliness? Can you vary the premiums based on how social someone is? How does this work for introverts, or shy people?
We hadn’t been designing an insurance scheme; however, this was how our questions were framed back to us. The resulted in us questioning our design ideas and how they were relating to insurance, rather than risk.
Trying to understand insurance works. Image by author.
Still uncertain or our direction, we spoke with Al. Unfortunately, we disagreed with some of the advice given: “get weird or dark with it”. This didn’t sit right while trying to design for over-65's, and was conflicted over whether to accept and include this into our design process, or disregard it.
We presented our research, our intentions and the feedback, and simply asked for help from the presentation audience, which included some of the OC.
Excerpt from the presentation: explaining how we were meeting the brief.. Image by author.
The feedback was mostly just telling us to ‘get on with it’, work with the research and don’t be too rational or ‘safe’ with the design. I felt like this didn’t help us in the slightest – we were lost in the process, so to have the tone of ‘you’re not doing good enough’ given to us through the feedback felt belittling and demoralising.
At the tutorial we laid out the things that were confusing us and why we were stuck. We acknowledged that as a group, most of us had professional experience and were used to designing in the real world for live client projects. We’d also connected with our participants, so to be pushed towards abstract, dark experiences was unsettling. Our goal was to design something meaningful for the over-65's and we weren’t going to be swayed, but we didn't have the confidence to disregard the tutors advice.
We resolved with the tutors to identify the key ideas we wanted to include in our project:
An exchange between people
The possibility for it to be intergenerational
Accessible without being enforced
An opportunity to positively influence someone’s life
On this basis, we ended the week with the intention of coming back to the drawing board with fresh ideas and a revived spirit.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B., Baker, M., Harris, T. and Stephenson, D. (2015) 'Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review', Perspectives on psychological science, 10(2), pp. 227-237. doi: 10.1177/1745691614568352.
Jaremka, L.M., Andridge, R.R., Fagundes, C.P., Alfano, C.M., Povoski, S.P., Lipari, A.M., Agnese, D.M., Arnold, M.W., Farrar, W.B., Yee, L.D., Carson, W.E., Bekaii-Saab, T., Martin, E.W., Schmidt, C.R. and Kiecolt-Glaser, J.K. (2014) 'Pain, Depression, and Fatigue: Loneliness as a Longitudinal Risk Factor', Health psychology, 33(9), pp. 948-957. doi: 10.1037/a0034012.
Klinenberg, E. (2016) 'Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Living Alone: Identifying the Risks for Public Health', American journal of public health (1971), 106(5), pp. 786-787. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303166.
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