Development of a Design Strategy for Playful Products of Older Adults

Abstract

To support developing new playful product for older adults, this paper briefly reviewed a range of existing playful products, and describes how they could be strategically deconstructed and refactored from the perspective of the five interaction elements (person, purpose, means, contexts, and actions). A design framework combining case analogies and persona methods was proposed. The formalized design strategy of persona and case-based interaction elements analysis system that mainly considers two parts in the design process which are called ‘inspiration cases’ and ‘typical users’ in this paper. The strategy can be applied to the process of re-designing a specific class of playful products, such as tangible toys or digital games, for particular older adults.

Keywords:

• case analogies
• persona
• interaction design
• tangible toys
• digital games
• healthy aging

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank these four funding agencies for their support of this work. All the authors confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science #1] under Grant [Project 18YJA760064]; [Experience Design Cutting-edge Methods and Technology Innovation Talent Recruitment #2] under Grant [111 Project B18027]; [Product Innovation and Culture Research Center of Jiangnan University, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities #3] under Grant [2019JDZD02]; [the China Scholarship Council #4] under Grant [No.201906790084].

Notes on contributors

Tingting Wang

Tingting Wang is a PhD candidate in Delft University of Technology, she finished a MA in Design at Jiangnan University in 2020, China ([email protected]). Her main research interest is design for healthcare. Her master's project focused on designing for healthy aging, and her PhD project is on improving patient experience in e-health domain using human-centered design.

Dongjuan Xiao

Dr. Dongjuan Xiao is an associate professor at School of Design, Jiangnan University, China ([email protected]). She received a Ph.D. in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Now she is the coordinator of design and research for healthcare team in school of design. Her research expertise is product service system design, interaction and experience design. Her research area is focused on design for well-being.

Yumei Dong

Yumei Dong is Lecturer at Design School, Jiangnan University, and a visiting scholar of Delft University of Technology ([email protected]). She is a member of the Inclusive Design Research Center, Tongji University, and a member of the Chinese Ergonomics Society (CES). Her research interests mainly focus on service design, social innovation, design for ageing and empathy in design.

Richard H. M. Goossens

Prof. Richard Goossens is a full professor of physical ergonomics at Delft University of Technology (TUD) ([email protected]), the Program Director of Convergence Health and Technology of TUD, Erasmus MC and Erasmus University, and the vice dean of Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. The emphasis of his research is on ergonomics/human factors in relation to product innovation in order to establish safe, comfortable and error-free task fulfillment in complex multi-user situations in a medical setting.