Silver Power__user inspired design

Silver Power is a part of the user inspired design course. In User Inspired Design (UID) course the traditional designerly problem solving and novel approaches to involve users into design decision making are applied to find out and describe emerging practices and design opportunities. The objectives are to understand the versatile business aims of concept design, learn user centered concept design process, learn to gather and use user and context information with approaches such as observations and self-documentation, learn to interpret qualitative user data for design purposes and to link user information with designerly problem solving, learn to generate, present and evaluate concept designs and practice with cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural co-operation.

The theme of this project is celebration. Our team chose the elderly people who live in the sheltered house as our target group. And our study question is what makes elderly people feel celebration. Fortunately, we got two different kinds of houses. One is a kind of ordinary sheltered house: Lauttasaaren vanhustentalo. Anther is a kind of alternative way of living: Loppukiri in Arabianranta.

Before we started the project, we did prestudy to understand the context first. We visited that two places informally, observed the environments, talked with people who live in there and interviewed the stuffs who work there to collect the date and get the initial impression.

After analyzing the date we gathered from the prestudy, we made the design probe and list the questions which we are going to ask in the formal interview. We gave the design probe to the ordinary sheltered house and also did the formal interview there.

We organized a workshop in Loppukiri which is a kind of alternative way of living and asked people to play the game we crated after we analyzed the date we got from the design probe and the interview.

The final concept included a new sheltered house and a digital garden. The key benefits of the new sheltered house are giving responsibility, raising activity level, making moving in mentally easier, encouraging moving and socializing inside the house, supplying with services and possibilities of the city and getting close of the nature. And the digital garden can take care of individual emotions, give people feelings of being important, alive and part of the community. It will also crate a communal atmosphere which will help to build good team spirit and have a community.