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Crafted with Care: Reflections from co-designing wearable technologies with care home residents  

Christopher Lim, Sara Nevay  

University of Dundee (2)

s.w.lim@dundee.ac.uk

Keywords: wearables; ageing; Craft; co-design

Abstract

With increasing longevity and changes in population demographics; designers, engineers and architects are faced with the challenge of providing older adults with enabling technologies and home environments that facilitate physical activity and wellbeing. To promote acceptance and adoption, making these technologies more desirable and less stigmatizing is crucial. In this paper, we outline a craft-based co-design methodology that we developed working with groups of care home residents designing wearables for research. The research asks care home residents to wear activity-monitoring devices to provide insight into the ways they currently utilise their spaces and where improvements could be made. We propose that a craft-based approach allows designers to understand and uncover people’s capabilities and needs in a non-intrusive and empathic way. Our findings show that using this approach enabled creativity, confidence and connectedness amongst participants. We discuss our reflections and insights that have implications on the approach and future work. 

This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

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Cite this paper: Lim, C., Nevay, S. (2016). Crafted with Care: Reflections from co-designing wearable technologies with care home residents. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.

This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme


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