Ageing together: Steps towards evolutionary co-design in everyday practices

Abstract

In this article we outline a temporally extended co-design process of media technologies developed in collaboration with elderly people. In the course of doing this, we identify a set of design strategies that helped to sustain the collaboration. Based on our experiences, we recognise the need for developing design strategies for extended and evolutionary design collaborations with ordinary communities that have special needs, and do not possess significant resourcing, design experience or skills in the technology in question. Such communities of practice pose challenges to shorter term project-centred forms of co-design and also require updates to the existing extended design approaches, which rest on relatively high user skill and resourcing. The ‘ageing together’ design strategies outlined in this article hence take necessary steps in adjusting co-designers' repertoires of engagement in this type of everyday context.

Keywords:

• co-design
• design for communities
• design-in-use
• elderly
• long-term engagement
• participatory design

Acknowledgements

We thank the Active Seniors for invaluable collaboration, colleagues at Arki research group and Kari-Hans Kommonen for contributions to the development of the work. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions. Without Mika Myller, Kirsti Lehtimäki and Roman Suzi, there would be no prototypes.

Notes

^1. Similar concerns are discussed in urban renewal collaborations such as in Amplify! (Penin, Forlano, and Staszowski 2012), Feeding Milan (Cantù et al. 2012) and Malmö Living Lab (Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011). However, these settings and correspondingly the strategies used differ somewhat from settings where technological possibilities and/or user practices are evolving rapidly, such as in current information technologies.

^2. They negotiated a price-regulated lot from the city of Helsinki and special working agreements with the construction company and the architects' studio.

^3. See http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/helsinki.html for how the area is presented as a Living Lab.

^4. From the outset it was clear that collaboration would need to happen creatively across different projects and funding instruments.

^5. This is not a novel premise as such; it is shared with the most radical co-design approaches. Its roots can be traced to Scandinavian participatory design (PD) in the 1970s (for a review see Voss et al. 2009).

^6. Confronting from the onset of a project the stakes, interests and limitations of stakeholders has been a feature of PD approaches (Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004). It was also a starting point for us and its importance was underscored in the course of our design engagements.

^7. We are not aware of systematic uses of access design elsewhere; however, various kinds of preliminary study in co-design approaches tend to function as ice-breakers, which suggests that there is a need for further work on possible strategies for this stage.

^8. Managing expectations is a pervasive part of successful long-term design collaboration. Its importance was clear to us from the outset, but anchoring it as concretely as possible as an important strategy in its own right became evident only as we went along.

^9. In the course of our work we have come to understand that the function of collaborative design techniques for ‘ageing together’ is to get design moving, not just iterating ideas for the realisation of a design object as in many user-centred design and co-design methods.

^10. On the importance of scaffolding for realising one's needs and competences see Vygotsky (1979). For related co-design techniques see, for example, Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen (2004) and Binder and Brandt (2008).

^11. Systematic and sustained presence at user sites has been stressed in the ethnographic tradition to systems design and taken to extremes in the co-realisation approach (Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss et al. 2009). We discuss in the next section why shorter exposures may work better with ordinary communities.

^12. Design strategies 8 and 9 draw on extreme programming and Agile Software (Beck et al. 2001) principles; however, their application in pure development contexts may be slightly different.

^13. For seeding design processes with prototypes see, for example, Ehn and Kyng (1991), Fischer and Ostwald (2002), Voss et al. (2009) and Hagen and Robertson (2010). On collective experimentation and prototyping see Björgvinsson (2008).

^14. This principle is core to all PD approaches (e.g. Schuler and Namioka 1993). In ageing together strategies it is also linked to concrete design decisions to be made in terms of intellectual property rights (see DS 13).

^15. Henderson and Kyng (1991) provide a nice early elaboration of this.

^16. Suchman (2002) argues similarly for the need for artful integrations.

^17. Similar implications are discussed in Büscher et al. (2009).

^18. Work done in urban studies and, for instance, Stewart Brand's study of how buildings ‘learn’ through time (1994) demonstrate that an extended design space is not an ICT-specific feature, even though its sensible form changes in different design contexts.