We do Care — Familiar Caregivers.
Before starting. A small consideration regarding terminology.
Before beginning with the lecture of this article, that explains our design process from start to finish, we want to stop a moment as a team, and reflect on the terminology used throughout the text to describe the caregivers we will be talking about.
The first brief we received gave us a clear theme to work on: “Informal Caregivers”. We started searching on this topic with eagerness, without questioning too much this outline that was given to us.
However, later, after carrying through a research and prototyping process that involved closely caregivers and other related user profiles, it was brought to us the question:
Is “Informal Caregivers” the best term to use when describing this collective?
After much consideration and conversations with said users, we realized that this term is too cold and too detached from the human and emotional side of the cares, and puts the emphasis on the condition of their work, instead of the human being.
We came to the conclusion, then, that “Familiar Caregivers” displays in a better light the positive aspects of the care work, and humanizes the people in the collective. This is why we decided it’s important to use this term throughout our service, implementing it in the app and web, the community activities and other products/experiences that derivate from it.
However, we have to finish this introduction by pointing out that during the composition of this article we were still using the word “Informal Caregivers”, and we decided to leave it like that, to avoid possible confusion and assure good continuity in this essay, changing the term only for the article title and our group name.
After this small digression, we invite you to read the full article and we hope you find it interesting and valuable. The Familiar Caregivers Team
First post.
A project about creating something that increases the quality of life of informal caregivers. It’s needed to do something about it because informal caregivers are people that, due to their social/economical situation, can’t afford a professional caregiver to take care of their oldest familiars or relatives with special needs. In Barcelona, there are lots of help for these kinds of families, but despite all the services offered by l’Ajuntament de Barcelona, there are still lots of families that have an informal caregiver, which have no knowledge or formation about the job they are doing.
With our project, we have to make these caregivers get the resources and information they need to get better with themselves and the ones they care for.
Researching…
We have been working on this project for two weeks now, and, so far, we have done some interviews, tests and lots of desktop research.
To make the most out of this research, we used different techniques and activities, each one serving a distinctive purpose.
First of all, when we started working on this topic, we developed a keywords list to emphasize and have a clear understanding of the most important topics, characteristics and persons/services that shape our field of research. We also decided to give the keywords list the structure of a mindmap.
This was useful, as we had a concise, structured document that summarized the most important keywords of our topic, but still showing us the bigger picture.
Now that we had a clearer idea of the reach of our topic, we started with our desktop research, which has consisted of looking up for referent projects that are similar to what we want to end up creating, as well as associations that are related with old people or people with special needs.
One of the main referents we’ve found is the “Caregiving Microsite” project, from fuelfor. On their website, they talk about the meaning of caregiving and what caregivers go through on their journeys… As well as a project they made in Singapore, which consisted of a program for caregivers and the cared ones. It was based on the needs of the informal caregivers, being those mental or physical, and it developed as an extracurricular activity where the caregiver would go with the person he/she is taking care of.
Other projects we found are, for example, “La Colla Cuidadora”, “The Care System”… And all of them try to get the lifestyles of the caregivers or the cared ones better.
All of this research, not only made our knowledge on the topic broader, but also gave us an idea of what other projects, activities and resources were already available, and how these had resolved the issues we were facing.
In the final part of this process we were starting to think ahead and plan for our next step; the interviews. Now that we had a clear picture of our topic, we could start to pinpoint which were the profiles of people that took an important role in the life of our informal caregivers, and therefore would give us useful information if interviewed. We did this using a Stakeholder Circle.
So, to end this initial stage of research, we created a database (that is meant to be updated every week) based on that Stakeholder Circle, filled with a list of people, services or associations that we thought would have something important to say and contribute if interviewed, tested…
How did we contact people?
Getting our minds ready for this next part of the project was not easy, we had a lot of newly gained knowledge, questions, doubts and hypotheses that needed to be arranged and shaped into fully formed questions that could give us the information, insights and ideas we were searching for.
To make this task more manageable, we used the profile database we had created to detect those profiles we knew were important and needed to have a voice in this conversation. Then we developed interviewing guides for each one of them.
These guides were all shaped differently, with questions that were specifically created for a definite profile, for each profile had different sets of knowledge that would help us understand and solve different parts of the problem.
Concurrently, we started contacting the selected profiles through email and phone calls, setting interview dates with them.
The methods used to perform these interviews were not only very diverse but were also heavily influenced by the current health situation. Therefore we had to adapt, and some methods like participant-observation had to be discarded, as we are working with people that work with or are part of a high-risk group. The methods we used are the following:
- In-person interviews. Luckily, two of our interviewees were closely related to us so we were able to conduct those interviews in person, achieving a more fluid conversation and comfortable environment.
- Video Calls/Phone Calls. These two methods were the most used, and although they were not the most desirable, they allowed us to have extended and conversation-like interviews.
- Written Answers. This was a good option for a specific case, where the interviewed person barely had time to spare and this gave her the flexibility to answer the questions whenever she liked. This method also allows the interviewee to answer well thought and written answers that you maybe wouldn’t get in a fluid conversation.
Once the interviewing process was finalized, we started the Debrief of all the main ideas, surprising and positive aspects, and existing problems we learned from those interviews. To make sure this debrief process was easy to understand and reference in the future, we made a small profile for each interviewee, and assigned a unique color to each one of them, making a color-coded system of post-it notes.
This is already proving to be helpful at the start of the next step we are taking in our process, where we are starting to dig deeper and analyze these post-its to find common themes and connections, to generate insights and design opportunities during this following week.
Quantitative data
During the investigation, doubts arose that, through the interviews, we would not be able to resolve because the questions asked were very specific, since the information we wanted to obtain depending on the person because even if they were caregivers, their situations were not the same. One of the doubts that we mostly took into account was the social impact that Informal Caregivers have, so we decided to create a Google Survey aimed at all types of audiences intending to recognize irregularities in terms of the appreciation of working conditions (economical, physical, social … etc) and the visibility of these people in society.
At the same time that we were developing the Google survey, we had planned to carry out another survey on the social network Instagram, to increase the information we wanted to obtain. We shared this idea with our professor Ariel Guersenzvaig, who explained to us that it might not be a good idea to do this survey, since we would only attract an audience from our social circle and this would not help us to collect the necessary information. So we decided to discard it.
New research methods
In order to continue researching our project, the new communication techniques and methods that we saw in Blanca’s class have been very useful to us, thanks to the talk of the guest, Sevérine. Since our subject matter is quite delicate, the manner and process that Sevérine uses opened our eyes and helped us discover a way in which we could better connect with our users.
To be able to conduct interviews with caregivers and the people who are cared for, in a faster, more efficient and fun way, such as the drawing or photo-journaling technique, to communicate extra information that we could not know in an interview.
So we asked them if they could photograph the adaptations in the home to help improve the quality of life of the person cared for. Thus we can connect with the user on an emotional and much more sensitive level.
Another way to observe and connect with their environment was with the following exercise, in which we intended to locate the persons/services the caregiver reaches for, from closer to further.
With this exercise, we wanted to leave a free format for the user to express themselves in the best way possible.
In the following exercise, we wanted to know how caregivers feel regarding the number of hours they invest in their work, the patience and sensitivity they need to have with the cared ones… So we asked them to fill in the weekly thermometers to show their emotions throughout the week, and use the box to write what they would like to highlight during those days, like positive or negative experiences, activities, specific feelings, among others.
During the past two weeks, which have been the first ones of the project, we learned new techniques we hadn’t worked with before, like the stakeholders map or the debrief of the interviews. All these resources helped us to broaden our knowledge and understanding of this topic, and therefore see clearly the impact it has in our society.
Second post.
When embarking on a new design project, it is a known fact that one of the most important and recurrent parts of the process is the research. But, what do you understand by research?
Some people think that sitting for several hours in front of a screen or book is enough to find the right answers to their questions. Granted, desktop research is essential when starting a project. However, when talking about Service Design, it makes a small part of what the investigation should be. Why?
Because Service design is customer-centric, putting the users at the heart of the project, and creating a series of interrelated experiences that connect with them on an emotional level. Therefore it’s also co-creational, creating and exploring all the options together, making connections between all the people that take part in the experience and the final product.
That’s why one of the most important parts of our research has been THE INTERVIEWS.
Learning through communication.
Previously we had done the research, we knew some of the main problems and situations informal caregivers faced in their day to day life, we thought we had a clear idea of how the conversations with the interviewees would go.
And yet, once we started those dialogues, we realized there were infinite nuances in people’s lives and experiences that we had not accounted for and shed a different light on some of our topics of discussion.
For instance, we dug deeper into the psychological state of the caregivers, and through their experiences, we learned the variety of factors that shaped their mental state: from the frustration of not knowing what to do or who to contact, the feeling of physical and emotional exhaustion, the defeat of not having free time for themselves, to the pressure of duty and accountability one feels when taking care of a loved one.
“My mom had to take care of everything by herself. Maybe, if my father had been there, everything would have been emotionally and mentally easier for my mother. The relationships within the household and with the other family members would have been different.”
— Mireia Pujantell, on her mom’s experience, when taking care of their grandad while being part of a single-parent household.“I’ve had a great experience [when taking care of my cared ones], but we have to admit that there is a great load of stress that comes with it. You know it will only last for some time because humans are not eternal, but you need to endure this duty. And it’s hard; there are difficult moments of nervousness, of burning out, of “I can’t do this anymore”… These feelings exist.”
— Anna Pons, Nursing Assistance Teacher and trained nurse, on the psychological impact when taking care of your family.
Other issues that were better defined and understood thanks to the collaboration of the interviewees where; the importance of having and knowing easily available resources, and, most importantly, the discussion about society’s perception of the caregiving field as a less relevant job and the prominent role women have in it (most times assigned by society itself).
“Because in the end, when we talk about cares, we are talking about all the essential activities for living […]. Meaning, all those elements that, in a way, are not taken into account as a distinct economy and end up isolated in an invisible space, though if they didn’t exist the productive world wouldn’t be able to function properly.”
— Esteve Segura, Feminist Leadership Technician.“We have the preconceived notion that women are the ones who will take care of others; they’ll take care of the children, of the parents, and will take care of the grandparents if necessary”
— Anna Pons, Nursing Assistance Teacher and trained nurse.
It’s clear, then, the weight these interviews have had (and will have) in the development of our research and ideation process, and how much they helped in expanding our knowledge, providing human, personal and relatable experiences.
So we would like to end this segment of the post by thanking wholeheartedly all the interviewees that took time off of their day to answer our questions and shared their private lives to help build this project.
Debriefing the interviews.
Once we had carried out the interviews, we focused on extracting insights from the interviews, in order to group them into different topics that we consider very important, and that cover each of the problems, needs and also the virtues of the experiences of the users. At the same time, we wanted to classify the insights into different groups based on their shared features.
Each color represents an interview and then, each shape represents where we extracted the insights from.
During the debriefing process, we found several issues, such as social and emotional needs for the cared ones, which we related to the social structure and infrastructure, which explain the adaptations to each caregiver and cared ones.
Regarding emotional aspects, caregivers need emotional or psychological support in which they can take shelter.
Another very important topic to be detailed is the training and knowledge that these informal caregivers could obtain, and we wanted to associate it with the values and qualities that they should have, many of which they get as they go.
The relation between the hours invested by the caregivers and the free time they had left after all was quite apparent. At the same time, we touched on the difficulties and needs on both sides, the circle of caregivers and the different types of care.
A positive point of view came out, in regards to the SWOT, and it’s the fact that as many residences closed due to the pandemic, the demand in caregiver agencies increased. This gives us the knowledge that many of the elders prefer to stay at home with someone they trust than going to residences.
Finally, one aspect that is very interesting and important to highlight is the work of women in these jobs and their feminist approach. In a field led by women, there is still an undervalue, and lack of recognition and equality in comparison to other jobs in society.
Types of Personas.
During the first four weeks, our team has been conducting extensive research on informal caregivers (economic situation, social position, needs …), from which, we have deduced that people who work informally face a series of difficulties and similar situations. The last step of this research was to create the profiles of these people, to be able to enter into context and/or understand their lives, needs and problems.
We created four User Personas that fit and symbolize the realities of these groups of people.
Why this Persona? Sofia represents the group of informal caregivers (mainly women) that devote 24 hours of their day to take care of family members or close acquaintances while juggling their housework and mother/wife roles at the same time.
Why this Persona? Verónica exemplifies women who not only feel alone because of their living situation but also face criticism and undervaluing from society because of their work in the caregiving field. However, they feel proud of their work and want to defend and reclaim the importance female caregivers have in society. This profile also helps to show the difference in genders that this profession has.
Why this Persona? Pere is a perfect example of the emotional and physical impact of having to work and care for someone at the same time as informal caregivers. All this amount of work puts the person under a load of stress and responsibility that is difficult to cope with alone.
Why this Persona? Rosa helps us understand the importance of personalized care that adapts to each individual and offers a more empathic and human-centered approach. It also helps us reflect on how we can help people with needs to be more open to the idea of using these services, as that would help to take some emotional and physical burden from informal caregivers.
In conclusion, when seeing the problems of these users through the profiles, it has been of vital help to us to collect a series of perceptions that demonstrate exactly what is happening in the lives of these informal caregivers, as well as in their familiar surroundings and work; to be able to create and design a creative project that supports and/or contributes a great help to these people, since without them, the foundation of society would collapse.
How might we questions.
In order to take as much as possible from the insights, that we already came out with, we had to write some questions that will help us understand what is really needed and vital for our project. We actually have 9 how might we questions, but we decided to show the most important ones which are the following ones.
A quick observation on the street.
In a Service Design project, contact and observation of how people act in certain spaces or with certain objects is very important, in order to see what works and what does not work in what we are studying, as well as its positive and negative aspects. That’s why it’s necessary to go out to the street to observe the environment in which we are working and thus make connections, reflections and obtain conclusions.
This is why we made a visit to Sant Antoni’s Superilla, in Barcelona. During the visit, we walked through the streets and took photographs like the following, in which it can be observed that there are some elderly people (alone or with their caregivers) who dedicate part of their mornings to chill outdoors, to meet and talk with friends, read the newspaper…
After making the visit, we began to generate quick ideas that could be related to informal care and applied in those spaces. One of them was to mark a meeting point for caregivers to go there with the person they are caring for, in order to socialize and meet people who have lifestyles similar to theirs. We believe that this could help them emotionally since it would be a way to get out of the routine and talk with other people about topics that may be of interest to everyone, apart from enriching their knowledge and expanding their range of knowledge and making new friends.
Another idea was to take advantage of an empty space, in which apparently nothing in particular is done; as you can clearly see in the image on the left; to mark health circuits for caregivers and the people they care for. In this way we would be adding physical activities and dynamism to the day to day of these people.
So far you have been able to read what we have been doing during the first 4 weeks of the project, which leads us to explain that during the next few weeks we will collaborate with master’s students from Parsons New School in NYC. We are very excited about that since we will work on a general brainstorming of possible projects and we will begin to prototype the ideas that come out through the brainstorming process and the sessions we’ll share with them.
Third post.
By now we have explained our research process and some techniques we used and now it’s time to let you know about all the ideas that we came up with along the way and the collaboration we did with Parsons students.
What happened with Parsons?
At the end of our second post, where we talked about our “how might we” questions and the Personas we created, we talked about a future collaboration we would do, during the next two weeks, with design students from Parsons, and now we are here to talk about it.
First, we had a general session with them, where we split into small groups to meet with our new team members and to start brainstorming ideas that we would be prototyping next. This turned out to be a very productive session, as we ended up with, approximately, 10 ideas that we classified in terms of digital, service, or manual ideas. Then, we discussed them and selected only two for each group, and, finally, we voted the ones we liked the most and we ended up with two only.
During the following weeks we worked individually with our Elisava and Parsons team to work on those two ideas, to see their pros and cons and to develop them even more. When we were working on those two, we realized that each of those had a lot of potential and that they could be connected by creating some kind of system, so we created the mindmaps you’ll see next.
Our final idea through mindmaps.
Once we had a clear view of the main ideas we wanted to develop we had to start setting the key aspects that defined them, so that, from then and moving forward we would always have a clear understanding of the initial idea we wanted to prototype.
To achieve that we used two methods: first, we utilized the system of the 7Ws of media to establish the key aspects of our concept.
- What? A platform that connects the users, so they can share caregiving duties and tasks.
- Who? Mainly for informal caregivers, but it’s also available for family members, neighbors, volunteers…
- When? At any time someone needs help or wants to do an activity.
- Where? A virtual platform that relates to the urban space of the Barcelona Superilles and their surroundings.
- Why? To help informal caregivers be more effective, share their problems and help and be helped by others.
- How? By creating a community that encourages helping others by offering their skills, time and knowledge.
After that, we used mindmaps to establish other aspects of the project.
- First Ideation Mindmap, Helped us establish the key features/characteristics of our service, all built around the question “What do you need and what can you offer?”. Thanks to that we set the importance of the Community, the Scheduling and the Care/Duty Sharing features.
- Scenarios, Stakeholders, Services Mindmap, Was created to detect all the spaces the service would take place in, as well as the types of users that would affect and services it would provide.
Our first prototypes.
All this ideation process proved to be really helpful once we started thinking about the project progress presentation we had to do with the presence of the Parsons Students and representatives of the Ajuntament.
Since we had established our three central ideas it was easy to start creating some prototypes that showed their main features. In the end, we ended up producing two videos that showed the workings of the Care-Sharing and the Scheduling services, the first one through drawings and the second one through video and drawings. We also brought up the idea of these two aspects combining into a service that would also be heavily connected with the community and urban spaces of the Superilles.
The feedback was overall positive, but it made evident that there were some aspects from the prototype that were lacking and that had to be reimagined and developed further.
The most notorious one was the importance and value of the strong community our project could end up creating, and therefore we had to push and explore this aspect more, to make it one of the main foundations of the service.
Iterated Idea
After the presentation with the Ajuntament we scheduled a new brainstorming session with our Parsons’ teammates and started to reflect on the feedback received; what did we hear? what did we need to improve? What were we missing?
Once we established the answers to those questions we had a clearer picture of the problems we were facing, and it was easier to find and iterate ways to solve them and evolve our idea.
We realized, then, that those new ideas could be grouped into three basic values we wanted our service to abide by.
After all this process we were finally able to redefine our idea as an online caregiving service that, through the main focus of skill, knowledge and time-sharing, connects an individual with the people of the neighborhood, creating a physical and digital community.
This time around the feedback was very positive, we were able to apply all the feedback we had initially received to create a new iteration that was easier to understand and really put the attention of the service on the creation of a caregivers community in the space of the Superilles.
It was also applauded for the fact that we were able to use our three initial HMW to create a service that cohesively solved all of them.
We interviewed Xabier Ballesteros!
Speaking with Xabier, we talked about various issues such as, for example, that it could be interesting to connect our project with La Colla Cuidadoraand / or with other projects like Vincles. He also told us that he saw a lot of potential in our idea of service design since it is closely related to generating a community for people who are invisible in the society of nowadays, and who need emotional support and what we want to offer with our project.
With our service, what we want to achieve is to go beyond a mobile application and generate emotional links between real users; in order to eliminate the loneliness suffered by people who work in this field since it’s a very lonely and individualistic type of work. Xabier told us that our project can help a lot in this aspect since it shows the situations these workers live in today and offers them the opportunity to learn, share and improve as caregivers and as people.
“Los cuidados hay que dejar de esconderlos, hay que hacerlos visibles.”
“We must stop hiding the cares, we must make them visible.”
Xabier Ballesteros“Muchas de las cosas que se, es porque alguien las ha compartido conmigo.”
“Many of the things that I know, are because someone has shared them with me.”
Xabier Ballesteros
Thanks to the advice we received from him, we will be able to improve the user’s trust when they have to use our service and when the user interacts with other users or professionals related to care.
What has been already done?
After iterating our final idea and receiving feedback from our Parsons team, the Ajuntament de Barcelona, Xabier Ballesteros and some of the persons we interviewed during the researching process, we thought it would be interesting to do some Benchmarking and investigate related apps that already exist or associations we could take as our referents, to see the positive and negative aspects of them, to know if they work or they lack in some aspects, and to see what makes our project unique, creative and innovating.
We learned that there are lots of apps that focus on the caregiving field, the shared schedules, journals, mood meters… But none of them, or at least of the ones we found, have all the aspects we are working on, and, the ones that are more similar to our idea, don’t seem to function well and don’t have many good reviews or opinions.
Although we found some apps that don’t work well, we found some others that work perfectly for what they offer, like the following examples:
- Mood meter: It consists of a “journal” where you update how you feel each day by selecting different moods you felt during the day. We could use this idea to help our users by notifying their close circle of people if they are marking “bad” or sad emotions.
- Time banking: It works like a time exchanging system where you offer an hour of help and then you know you will receive another hour of help from someone else in exchange. This could help us understand more about sharing skills/knowledge.
- Ianacare: It can be summarized by the idea that users create their own community of people that will help them with their daily tasks, giving them support, sharing schedules… It’s very similar to our project’s idea but, in this case, it doesn’t have the sharing skills/knowledge or the connecting with neighbors part.
Apart from these 3, we took Fixperts, likewe.care and other communities as referents because we think they can help us improve our project a lot. They are more related in the community aspect, which is one of our biggest interests; to create a community where family caregivers can help and be helped by others, with the aim of having emotional support and a place to learn new things or have answers for their questions.
Fourth post.
We are in the last weeks of the project and as time progresses, our project too. In this publication, we will explain some of the methodologies that we have used to define which routines one of our “People” profiles could follow and how our service could help to improve their day-to-day life.
We will also teach the process of creating the mobile application, which goes from the ideation of its functions to the prototyping of them and their screens.
Finally, we will explain how we have created the “advertising” video that explains our service and how the classes on ethics and design, by Ariel Guersenzvaig, have made us reflect on the project and the situation we are experiencing today.
And finally, we will show the final results of the mobile application, the web and the video that help us to materialize our project and its operation in a virtual way.
How can our service help its users?
To understand how we can help future users with our service, we used the User Journey and Blueprint techniques to be able to imagine how the user’s daily life would be affected before and after being part of the community of “The Caresharing System ”.
In the following image, we propose the monitoring of a person who has a professional face-to-face job and, in his free time, also acts as an informal caregiver towards his mother.
We have proposed a very basic routine, based on the particular case of one of the profiles we interviewed, in which the user had very little free time due to his working hours and having to take care of his mother at night. In the journey of the future, we have proposed a more efficient and organized routine, in which the user has time to play sports with people they have met through “The Caresharing App”, prepare dinner with his wife and spend more family time with his kids. In the diagram that is situated in the center of the two journeys, it can be observed how, in the future journey, the user has more positive emotions and, although he ends the days very tired, he ends them with more happiness and positivism.
The user journey helped us understand what the day-to-day life of a possible user is or can be like, and we took advantage of the content we generated to create a blueprint map, as can be seen in the image below, to help us understand how the mobile application works and how to navigate in it.
After creating this blueprint, we thought it would be interesting to share it with our Parsons team so that they could give us feedback with tips or aspects to improve. That is why there are black notes, which are the contributions that Darcy, Mohammad and Ellie made, in order to help us develop the application as best as possible.
How to represent these journeys?
Once the blueprint map was finished, we started to create some vignettes that will help explain the context of how and when a user can learn about our service and how, afterward, our service can help them solve the needs that arise in their daily lives.
The scenes that you’ll see below are the simulation of a real situation in which a caregiver needs to go to buy medicine at the pharmacy because a particular medication is empty, and the same saleswoman, from the pharmacy, gives him a flyer with information about “The Caresharing App” and a meeting to play petanque in the public space.
Next, it can be seen how this same user has a need again but, in this second case, he cannot leave home to solve it. Since the blue silhouette is now a user of the mobile application, he decides to ask for help by using the map function; a situation that coincides with scenes 3 and 4, in which another user (the orange silhouette) physically helps him with the problem that has arisen.
Finally, we have represented the function of the forum and the diary/mood meter, in scenes 5 and 6, through the publication of content towards the community by the orange user, and the personal reflection of both users writing how they felt that day.
Our service becomes an app.
How can we materialize a service? Well, when we are talking about a service, we are talking in a certain way of a system that encompasses many aspects and that, in general, is not material.
We have been giving it several turns and we came to the conclusion that our best option would be to generate a mobile application that is summarized in all the aspects that our service entails.
As it is a university project, we have chosen to prototype a fake app that shows the vital and most important functionalities of our service, and that is why we have decided to focus on the most essential screens that summarize as much as possible what “The Caresharing System” is.
As can be seen in the image above, we began with the general prototyping of all the functions and details of the application. It was then, when talking with our teacher Sofia Majan and Sílvia Fabra, graphic and web designer, we realized that we should not prototype all the details of the app but rather the main and most essential screens with which, seeing only those, the project is understood in a summarized way.
That’s why we made the decision to simplify screens and focus on the general features we want to offer, which we’ll explain below.
- Profile: Gives important information about the tasks or appointments that the user has that day, as well as showing an emotional diagram that summarizes how he/she has felt during the last days. It also shows personal information of the user and the publications that he/she has posted, as well as those that have interested him/her from other users.
- Calendar: It works the same as any standard calendar, such as the “Google Calendar”, but, in this case, it offers the option of sharing the calendar to see the tasks of your closest contacts and that they see yours, being you a user of the app.
- Mood meter: Within the mood meter we find 3 options that will help the user to introspect their emotions and reflect on their daily life. The first option is what we call mood meter, which basically consists of a classification of groups of emotions that will generate a diagram with the balance of the emotions that more or less predominate, with regard to the user’s choices. Apart from the mood meter, we find the option of the journal, to write in words about how the user has felt or any annotation they want to make about that day. Finally, there is the option of a weekly mood meter, which will end with the help offered by the application itself, in which exercises, videos … will be offered to the user, in order to improve emotionally.
- Chats: Simulates the user’s contact list, in this case showing the contacts made from the application and the conversations, individual or in groups, that had been generated.
- Community: The “community” section consists of a general forum where users can post about care or other topics of interest. In addition, there is also the option to ask for help that is connected to a map to show the user which users, around him/her, are available at that time to help him/her, in order to generate these physical encounters and create community by sharing help and knowledge/skills.
Ethics in design.
This section may, at first glance, seem that it is disconnected from the project since we are constantly talking about the service we have created, how it works, what it is summarized in, creating possible profiles and how we understand their day to day life…
But, if we go beyond the project and we look at the context that has surrounded us, we realize that this section is very necessary since what we will see next is some exercises and knowledge that have helped us to reflect on why we are doing what we are doing, and how we can improve so that what we are creating is ethical and respectful.
In the classes on Fridays, we have dealt with very varied topics but the ones that have marked us the most have been those that have to do with ethics in design, which have been taught by Ariel Guersenzvaig.
These classes introduced us to personal and group reflection with two methodologies, theory as the first and practice as the second. Of these two, we are interested in focusing on practical methodologies, in which the teacher gave us an exercise with or without examples, that we had to apply to our particular project. That is why, below, we will show two exercises that we have done in Ariel’s classes.
In this first exercise, on the image below, we can see a list of values, called “values overview”, and some activities to be carried out with those values. How did this activity help us? Well, this exercise helped us to better define what values we want our project to have for society and the user himself. It made us reflect on which were the most important and / or necessary values and we ended up with a good result, as can be seen in the image.
In this second exercise, on the image below, the teacher provided us with a long list with 41 questions related to the well-being of users, ethics … from which we had to select the 10 that seemed most relevant to us and develop an answer for each one, working in group and generating conversation, reflection and argumentation about our answers.
Once the selected questions were answered, we did a self-reflection on positive and negative aspects that could arise with our project, we raised doubts and tried to find solutions to these problems (as can be seen with the yellow notes).
Fifth post.
Well, it seems that we have reached the end of this wonderful project that has taught us so much… That is why we decided to focus on this last publication to show the final result of everything we have been generating.
Below you will see our corporate image as “The Caresharing System”, our final mobile application so that you can navigate in it, the promotional video that we have made so that the project is understood and, finally, our website.
What does “The Caresharing System” look like, when we talk about graphic design?
Starting with our logo, which is on the image below, we decided to use the illustration of a heart being held by two hands because, during this long process, we’ve learned that sharing cares means sharing love and we think that this is one of the principal messages we want to show.
The two hands not only mean the fact that we want to share the cares but it also means community and connections between users, and that’s why we chose this to be the image of our logo.
We also decided to use this blue because it’s a color that defines our project well. And we also decided to put the name of our project next to the illustration so it has the full name and when you read “The Caresharing System” next to the hands holding the heart, you kind of understand what it is about.
When it comes to our color palette, we decided to use neutral and basic colors like the two greys and the non-full black you can see in the image below, because they are colors that don’t stand out and don’t take the protagonism of our two main colors. Being the blue the actual main one, and the red the secondary one that we used to highlight important details.
This color range is a mix of warm and cold colors, as well as colorful and more neutral ones. We think that it works really well with the project we came up with, as you can see on the website and the app.
Finally, the typography. We decided to go for the Poppins typography because we thought that its softness and curves make it look very clean and smooth, but with keeping a fun look that makes it be more close to the user.
“The Caresharing App”.
In the previous post, we have shown how the final screens of the main functions of the app look like, but in order not to lose any details, here is a link that will allow you to navigate through the app to discover everything it contains.
How does our role-play video look like?
As you saw in the 4th post, we made a visual representation of our service, using sketches of 6 role-play scenes. Now, we’ve arrived at a point where those sketches have become real and we transformed them into the video you’ll see next.
The website.
This website is the result of all the effort and dedication behind this project. That is why it is also a general summary of everything we have been creating.
That said, in the link below, you will find all the content that we believe is essential to be able to explain the service we have designed and all the details that comprise it.
Bibliography.
https://www.fuelfor.net/caregiving Caregiving Microsite — 30 de Septiembre
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/unpaid-caregivers/474894/ The Work That Makes Work Possible — 30 Septiembre
https://www.barcelona.cat/ciutatcuidadora/es/espacio-barcelona-cuida/que-es Ciutat Cuidadora — 30 de Septiembre
https://www.fuelfor.net/caregiving?wix-vod-video-id=262e8c3996a4498dabf2431a7bbdec8e&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-j2f5202k TIRED-Caregivers need care too — 01 de Octubre
https://www.fuelfor.net/caregiving?wix-vod-video-id=9b3e7c2707a64d93b8796a2ab6df20cd&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-j2f5202k TRUST-Caregiving is a familiar affair — 01 de Octubre
https://vimeo.com/175690107 Behind the scenes of fuelfor project — 01 de Octubre
https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-019-1274-0 Needs and skills of informal caregivers to care for a dependent person: a cross-sectional study — 3 de Octubre
https://es-es.facebook.com/salvemoslaresidenciadeancianosdesarria/ Facebook “Salvemos a la Residencia Señora del Carmen” — 4 de Octubre
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https://aiudo.es/cuidado-de-ancianos-europa/ Aiudo, Los mayores ancianos — 6 de Octubre
https://lacruzazul.com/personas-mayores/?gran=personas_mayores&ge=1005424&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIm7L-p6Gb7AIVIu7mCh0i3QrcEAAYASAAEgKeifD_BwE La Cruz Azul, Ayuda a Domicilio a Personas Mayores — 15 de Octubre
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http://www.lacollacuidadora.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Article-XGC-Barcelonasocietat15light.pdf Pdf de Xabier Ballesteros Olazaba, Barcelona Societat, Centre Serveis Socials — 18 de Octubre.
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/dretssocials/ca/bones-practiques-socials/la-colla-cuidadora-del-eixample Ajuntament de Barcelona, La colla cuidadora del Eixample. Es una xarxa de grups de cuidadors: http://www.lacollacuidadora.net/ La seva web. Realitzen diferents activitats(cinema, cuina, jocs mentals, llibres, poemes..) — 18 de Octubre
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/dretssocials/sites/default/files/docs-bp/fitxa_divulgativa_la_colla_cuidadora_2017.pdf PDF. Banc d’experiencies y bones practiques. La colla cuidadora de l’eixample — 18 de Octubre
https://www.65ymas.com/sociedad/modelo-nordico-residencias-propone-iglesias-cuesta-3-veces-paga-estado-por-plaza_16157_102.html ¿En qué consiste el modelo nórdico que propone Pablo Iglesias para las residencias de los mayores? — 19 de Octubre
https://www.gopaintlove.org/mood-meter Mood meter — 25 de Octubre
https://mayii.jp/ “app” student fromparsons — 25 de Octubre
https://www.buurtzorg.com/ Butzoorg Nederland — 27 de Octubre
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/vinclesbcn/ca/vincles-bcn “Vincles” — 28 de Octubre
https://www.care100list.com Care 100 The most influential people in care of 2020–28 de Octubre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgAvfNena1Y “Herman el abuelo con Alzheimer” inspiracion emocional — 3 de Noviembre
https://www.catchafire.org/ Catchafire — 6 de Noviembre
http://fixing.education/ FixEd — 6 de Noviembre
https://www.allforgood.org/ All For Good — 6 de Noviembre
https://likewe.care The Care System — 6 de Noviembre
https://blogprofesional.fotocasa.es/costumer-journey-map-puntos-basicos-del-viaje-del-cliente-inmobiliario/ Journey map 2019–7 de Noviembre
https://www.smaply.com/ Customize User Journey — 7 de Noviembre
Writers: Lia Alsina Virgili, Laura Català Matas, Marta Moreno Soler, Manuela Quintero Alzate.
#WeDoCare
