#5 Reflections — Waveline and Themes
Erin’s journey of activity planning for older adults
During our visit to ECA’s home office at Alameda, we had an in-depth interview with Erin on her specific experience as a Life Enrichment Team member and had her walk us through the overall journey of creating an activity (with external community partners)from scratch. We then created a wave line, mapping the highs and lows of her journey. The wave line helped us to reflect on Erin’s journey of activity planning for older adults in a visually intuitive way and to easily identify potential design opportunities for a more desired experience.
With the X-axis being TIME, and the Y-axis being the INTENSITY OF EMOTION, the wave line maps out the experience of different stages throughout the process of turning an idea to an activity.
The journey starts from recognizing and identifying the unmet needs of senior residents in the community, which is an ongoing process taking place in her daily interaction and/or conversation with the residents. Not every need identified leads to new ideas, but brainstorming for possibilities is definitely one of the most pleasing moments of the journey. After an idea is generated for a potential new activity, Erin needs to run a small-scale testing and validate it with feedback both from the community and her team members.
When the activity is set, it’s the time when external organizations are involved. A lot of phone calls will be made around the gives-and-gets of the partnership, as well as matching the calendars for the earliest availability. Then comes the dirty work of logistics, including paperwork, background checking, and finally marking the activity on the calendar. It’s a major pain point of the journey for Erin, because she’s often too occupied to spare any attention to these time-consuming tasks.
“Caregiving takes up so much of the time and energy of the Life Enrichment team that they barely have the capacity to sit at their desks and plan ahead.”
From this point to the exact day of the planned activity, it’s all about conveying the information to the community. Other than flyers and bulletin boards, Erin and her team also make sure that each resident receives monthly and weekly calendars of their own. Despite all of this, Erin enjoys physically inviting the residents, on the day of the activity. After the activite, Erin tries to get feedback from the participants right on site,since a lot of them are suffering from memory loss. She intentionally avoids leading questions like “did you enjoy it?” or “do you want to participant again?” for a more objective understanding of their experience.
From the current wave line of Erin’s process, we identified that our biggest design opportunity lies in improving the communication system both within the staff members for a pellucid logistical system, and between staffs and the residents to achieve better broadcasting an engagement.
Ideally, we were hoping to talk with other members of the Life Enrichment Team to also map out each of their own journeys and look for patterns in the wave lines. However, due to the current quarantine situation of COVID-19 and the vulnerability of the older adults community, we are unable to plan those conversations anytime soon.
Thus we moved on to collate our research and look for overarching themes and opportunities that would help the next stages of our design process.
From synthesizing the secondary and primary research we conducted, a concurring pain point and emerging opportunity that unified a lot of our findings, was the need for a Communication System at Elder Care Alliance. There appears to be a gap at different levels of communication for various stakeholders of the system. We mapped these out as exhaustively as we could, to use as a reference and guide during the upcoming brainstorming phase of our process.
