The Collective Classroom: Designing to Alleviate Social Isolation Among Older Adults
This project was started in a Human Computer Interaction Studio course, where we were told to “design to make the world a more just and equitable place.” Our group settled upon designing to reduce loneliness for the elderly, especially in the context of an extremely isolating pandemic.
Problem Space & Goal
Older adults lack access to resources that alleviate the burdens of social isolation. We want to make resources available to empower older adults to reach out independently if they choose.
Many of the technological solutions for communication that younger generations have turned to were not designed with older adults in mind. In one sense, we wanted to make sure that our solution helped older adults regardless of ability. Staying true to the prompt, we also wanted to make sure that our solution was available to all, regardless of socio-economic status.
After a lot of user research, interviews, discussions, and critiques, our goals for the project are outlined below:
1) Low commitment solution and low barriers to entry to encourage willingness and participation
2) High socialization between users, other users, curated social groups, and volunteers/workers
3) Affordability, taking into account that not everyone has access to expensive technologies independently
4) Familiar and intuitive design based off our users’ existing mental models
5) Autonomy, choice, and empowerment to older adults
6) Positive impact measured by self-reported well-being
7) Our design should focus on the strengths of elderly (lived experience, etc) as opposed to their weakness.
Target User
Our target users are older adults aged around 56-76 in the United States.
Our insights were collected through literature reviews, interviews from gerontology professors and service providers who work directly with elderly individuals. The key insights collected are below:
Typically for older adults, deepening already existing relationships (curated friend groups, family) is more important than creating new social connections.
There are stark differences in personality, specifically introversion and extraversion, regardless of age demographic. We make this design to facilitate social connection for broad personality demographics in the elderly population.
It is important to maximize independence and autonomy; reflection, level of depth, channel of communication and frequency should all be completely up to the user. Many adults must rely on a “family advocate” to assist them, despite a strong preference towards independence.
Language and attitude towards older adults is crucial; for example, many do not particularly like the terms “elderly” or “senior”
Roles and Responsibilities
This project coordinated through a Human Computer Interaction Studio course and consisted of 4 designers: Amelia Lockhart, Matthew Dressa, Suin Jung and Sheri Guo. Every person conducted research, synthesized insights, brainstormed possible ideas, presented at critiques, and worked on drafting and mocking up our final solution.
My main responsibilities included:
Conducting research through literature reviews
Collecting insights through interviews
Ideation for possible solutions
Synthesizing insights and presenting progress for class critiques
Designing our final solution
Mocking up and polishing design work and layouts through photoshop, figma, and illustrator
Scope and Constraints
The scope of this project was to fully design and flesh out a feasible idea for our problem space. As it was a one semester course, implementation and launch were not included as a part of the scope for this project.
Our main constraints for this project include:
Outreach Difficulty: Socially isolated older adults will be harder to reach by definition and we will need to find intermediaries to gather the information we need.
Uncomfortable Topic: Social stigma associated with loneliness making it an uncomfortable topic for our users.
Diverse Perspectives: When designing, we need to consider different social norms, values, and living situations of older individuals across different cultures. Also, it may be hard to communicate with and reach older adults who do not speak English.
Design Process
Initial Ideation
Considered Concepts
Next Iteration: Walking University
Final Solution
Our final solution is The Collective Classroom, an affordable and accessible education program for older adults that uses an exchanged device and simple materials to encourage collaborative learning and prevent social isolation.
Every week, each participant will go to a loaning station (or opt in for home delivery) to pick up the materials for the course. Each student then has 48 hours to use the device from the comfort of their own home and return it or have it picked up by the end of the allotted time.
The loaning materials package contains an ipad (which must be returned), as well as a flash drive, workbook, and a contact book which are kept by the student. The flash drive is plugged into the ipad to keep track of the student’s courses and progress in each, and also allows for our system to be wifi-free.The workbook provides spaces to note take and also contains discussion prompts that will be used after the ipad is returned. The contact book is used similarly, and allows the student to record the contacts of different classmates who are in current as well as past courses.
As for the user interface of our design, you can see that it consists of four sections which are on the navigation/progress bar at the top. In the home page, the student can choose a course, on the lecture page, they can watch this week’s video lecture and adjust a few settings, on the response page they can write or record answers which will later be reviewed by the teaching assistants and on this last page, they have another student’s name, phone number, and meeting date for a discussion section later in the week. Other design features include large arrow buttons that require less touchscreen accuracy and a circular navigation that ensures that the student will not get lost in the interface.
Once the interface is returned, the student now has the discussion partner’s name, phone number and meeting time, and can engage in a discussion over the phone that allows the student to meet a new peer every week and talk about course materials that interest them both.
At the end of the course, there is also a final presentation that works by collecting video responses from students, stitching them together into a reel, and then showcasing them in place of the next week’s lecture. After watching these presentations, the instructor or TAs will create a conference phone call where students can talk about their work and the work of others.
