Hours 3 and 4: Insights

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Team CORE @OzCHI24

3 min readAug 20, 2016

Primary Research

To better understand our user age bracket, we walked out of our design studio to find anybody who could give us their time for a few moments and speak with us. Considering the timezone differences, that’s 10:30pm for us. People were very gracious to help us when we told them about the design challenge being 24-hours long.

Participant 01

Tod Alexander is aged 61 and is a Neurosurgeon, who is on campus to be with his son for the days leading up to the beginning of the school year. In our conversation with Tod, we found that he strongly believes in the older generation being independent and “not be a drain on society.”

Participant 02

Larry is aged 63 and is a facilities supervisor, who works the graveyard shift at the on-campus hotel. Larry has been working for the past 40 years and is not ready to quit. He wants to work towards being fit and believes that working for another 5 years will help him in doing that.

Other participants who know the target audience

We interviewed three people who know elderly people — their grandparents. Some of the key takeaways from these interviews were:
1. Most older people these days want to be self-dependent in the sense that they want to make their own living.
2. They find new ways to be active so that they are not bored of retirement — continuing the work as a consultant, reading blogs etc.
3. They make the aging smoother by doing physical activities.
4. Some people feel that technology is beyond their abilities and the rest fight against that notion.

Literature Review

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “…Although there is substantial evidence that older people contribute to society in many ways, they are instead often stereotyped as frail, out of touch, burdensome or dependent.” Our understanding of healthy aging was influenced by the definition mentioned in this paper — the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age. Both internal and external factors play a role in maintaining healthy aging.

Affinity Diagramming

Based on all the data that we collected from multiple sources, our team spent time on stating key points and then worked towards forming an affinity under different headings.