Hours 1 and 2 : Research
Framing the problem
Problem framing is very essential in design. It unlocks innovation.“Healthy aging” could mean anything. But what does it mean to us as individuals and what does it mean to people who we know. As a team, we started with reading out the prompt and writing down the keywords which we think are very crucial in understanding the problem landscape(the middle part of the picture). Then we wrote down our first thoughts around what are those problem areas that could be solved by technology. This gave us a general understanding of what is our perception of the scenario.
How does it help?
We are using the list of things on the board as a tool for thinking outside the box. “If it’s not any of these, what is it then?”. And if anything else that we come up with does not make sense or does not work, we have 10 areas of which we can choose one. At this point, it’s very essential to come out of our own knowledge zones and ask people what they think about the problem.
We’ve two kinds of subjects for our interviews — people who have access to our target audience and people who are our target audience.
Interviews
We came up with a short list of questions to understand what’s their perception of the problem is. The questions are semi-structured in a way that the answers are not constrained to the questions we are asking. Here’s a link to the list of questions for the target audience, the elderly — https://goo.gl/forms/1oYqmK3H3xtzjro52. The questions were asked in a passive voice when we talked to the indirect audience — people who have access to the elderly.
In parallel, we are conducting interviews with the people who fall under the age bracket of 60+. We will have the findings in our next blog post.
