Reflections on “Inclusive Service Design for senior citizens in gated communities

As a part of service, system & infrastructure studio, in the first class itself we had been given a brief about all the three and how service & infrastructure work within a system. In the beginning, we got an opportunity to explore how do Gated Communities work, why were mobile applications introduced initially in those communities and what are the influences of Rating Systems on workers working there? The studio was for 3 weeks, in which first week was to decide a research objective or a proposal with a timeline, for which we focused on Senior Citizens dwelling in gated communities and provide ways to make the system more inclusive for them.

In the beginning classes, we mapped out different gated community mobile applications and made a competitor analysis of all the services provided by them thus finding out that none of them had focused on Senior Citizens even though they form a greater part of the community and their way of dealing with the community is different from other sections as most of them stay 24*7 inside the community or in the neighborhood. Refer to the following links to understand more about the intervention and output of the project:

research proposal, process, output.

What did I learn from the studio?

• An understanding of Design through Research which is basically problem solving and Research through Design which involves making of some props to probe into the problem. The papers which were shared during the studio had lots of examples showcasing both the approaches which gave us a clear insight to try with both approaches and further go on with one which was better apt for our problem statement.
• Interviewing Older Citizens was fun learning for me. We talked to many of them and got a vivid perception that ‘Senior Citizens’ is a broader category as each of them have different needs, interests, liking etc. & it was difficult to cater the requirements of each one of them. This studio gave me a chance to look into their lives, and understand their pain points which was a great experience for me.
• Use of different Service Tools for better understanding and mapping the scenarios. The various service tools shared with us helped us to break and map the scenarios better which made the tasks easier for us to pin the pain points and find the gaps within the service.
• From faculties and other peers, I got an idea of different other methods/approaches to this problem other than the approach we followed and came to a solution. This gave me an opportunity to think this problem from different angles and analysing what could have been the possible advantages or disadvantages if we would have approached it through those methods.

Service Design according to my understanding:

Before going to Service Design, we should know what exactly a service is? According to my understanding, a product should be delivered to its customers via a service. So, basically service is a middleman between owner and the consumer. Now, Service Design is a way of understanding customers’ journey deeply and scooping out the intangible experiences to design services to improvise the overall experiences making it more user friendly and sustainable.

In conclusion, the studio gave me some clear vision about Service Design making me understand the implications of providing a good service, which I hope I could use in my future projects to understand my customer needs and avail the service to optimum.