Involvement of elderly people in Co-Design

“Co-design is really exciting, but it can also be really challenging”

For instance, Sara’s project called “Healthy Homes” was working with older people in Dundee who live independently but perhaps need support in terms of accessing fuel and energy but who were not accessing available services. Having dampness in the home resulted in more and more respiratory issues and many of them were hospitalized. They were invited to co-design workshops to share and draw some of the challenges. For the question “how do you find out whom to ask for help?”, most of them answered  “I don't know because I know a lot of the information is on the Internet, but I don't have the internet, I don't have a mobile phone. How do I connect with these people and services? “

Even though there are several modes of networking systems, due to unawareness, elderly people are suffering even health-related issues as a reflection of their lack of involvement in the design process, says Sara. 

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But how Sara solved this problem is that they had another workshop with the service providers and letting them draw the problems they think about this issue.  These two sets of information from the two different stakeholders helped Sara to sort out the problems with the communication. 

Here, the knowledge gained results in the question that “what could the designers do next?” And that created a path for redesigning a new sort of service map that embedding people in the community instead of relying on online sites. 

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Co-design in that respect is so important to hear, listen, and share. And that is really exciting about co-design because so often people think that the redesigned service is common sense. There will be a question “Why did designers didn’t think of that first?” The reason is that there's so much matter considered at the beginning. 

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There are other sorts of participatory research and design approaches that support people coming into the process. But Co-design is really about empowering everybody and having their voice heard and express what is made. Whereas in some other participatory research it might be the designer, the researcher is learning with different communities or stakeholders or maybe translating the issues or ideas into the design thinking. Whereas in co-design it's all sort of people being empowered and contributing together.

“We all have a role to play”

A lot of the methods that is used in co-design are about making complex social and political, cultural, and societal issues visible. And so there's a lot of drawing or model making and ways that allow seeing what's going on in a particular situation. Therefore, that can be challenging for people who don't necessarily identify themselves as drawers or sketchers, or models, especially senior citizens. In addition to that, since it is bringing people together with lots of different ideas and expectations, Sara believes it can be arduous sometimes as the designers have to negotiate what will be most workable for everybody 

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On designing a product, the designer may not necessarily be able to relate fully to the experience and problems of the people, especially elderly people, and their problems. Therefore by bringing them into the process early to understand what their lived experiences are, what's important to them, and what would really be a good intervention in terms of a designed product to support something being better or different. And Sara believes having the people involved in the earlier stage allows her to understand better, and create something that has more - impact. 

However, co-design workshops that include people of different ages may also have several challenges. Stanley king has mentioned in his book "Co-Design, a Process Of Design Participation" that during his workshops, certain seniors exhibit nervousness over the energy the young people display, even an angry resentment over their presence. The presence of young people causes them to feel that the event is less than distinguished and that the discussion is unimportant. But towards the end, less engagement in the discussion will affect those groups in the final design process. 

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Therefore, Special arrangements are included in workshops for the elderly, which are planned as social events.  Even free refreshments are provided and it became an important attraction to the elderly. In addition, volunteer writers are assigned to sit with senior citizens who wish to talk and the response is recorded with care. 

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Sara has a similar way of Co-Design experience when he worked with Chris Lim for local care homes in Dundee to understand how enabling the built environment was. The buildings that are used for care homes were often very old, and not necessarily designed for the purpose of older people with different sorts of health and mobility needs

Fig 1. Co- design activities at care home

Instead of an interview that is more linear, what Sara did was they had co-design activities with the care for the residents’ staff such as craft activities, using art and using different other sort of generative ways of creating things that would represent the interests and needs of the participants in the research.  

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This is a way to allow them to reflect and create different visualizations of their experience, which helped Sara to understand different insights around their experiences. After this, designing a wearable product that captures data on where and how much time elderly people are in a place at care home helped Sara to find the problem with the handles of the door which were too tight and difficult to operate.

Fig 2. Wearable product designed by Dr Sara