First Workshop on Teaching Design for Vulnerable Generations: Children and Elderly @ CHItaly 2013

In conjunction with “CHItaly 2013 – Building Social Innovation”  Trento, 16-19 September 2013

SUMMARY AND THEME

In today’s society, while children and elderly are gaining influence they can still be considered in a broad sense as groups of vulnerable people. In many cases, they have less control of their lives and are more dependent on others to help out with various kinds of things than the average population. In addition to this, they may also have various kinds of cognitive and physical restrictions. For these reasons the term vulnerable generations will be used to denote the group children and elderly as a whole.

In line with their increased influence, there is a growing awareness of the needs of vulnerable generations.  Innovative use of design specifically targeted towards these groups’ special needs can contribute greatly to the improvement of their wellbeing, preventing them from facing difficult or stressful situations. However, less work has been spent on developing teaching modules for design methods and practices aiming at covering the needs of elderly and children. Accordingly, more work is needed on design for these groups.

GOALS AND EXPECTED AUDIENCE

The workshop address how designers of the future can build social innovation for vulnerable generations and thereby address important social challenges, and is a forum where educators from different fields within design can meet and exchange experiences from teaching.

The workshop intends to bring together educators, designers, and practitioners to explore the sensitive issues regarding designing technical solutions for vulnerable generations, to discuss training needs from different perspectives, and to share best practice methods to teach designers how to design technologies for vulnerable generations - elderly and children. 

SUBMISSION

Interested participants are invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper offering perspectives on the workshop topics, using the ACM CHI Extended abstracts format.  Submissions must be made via the conference submission system  . Over length or badly formatted submissions will be rejected without any further review process. The accepted position papers will be published on the workshop web page. The website will also be used for community building and discussions.

DEADLINES

July 1th  Deadline for position papers

July 15th Notification of acceptance

Sept 16-19th  Conference

ORGANIZERS

Eva Eriksson - Interaction Designer and Lecturer at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden)

Olof Torgersson - Program Director of Chalmers’ master’s programme in interaction design (Sweden)

Caterina Calefato - PhD in Computer Science, Coordinator of the EU-funded project DEVICE (Italy)
Roberto Montanari - PhD, Coordinator of Human Machine Interaction Group, member of  ICOOR - Interuniversity Consortium for Optimization and Operations Research, (Italy)
Chiara Ferrarini - PhD in Innovation Engineering, Interaction Engineer within RE:Lab S.r.l. (Italy)

Winners of DEVICE Award 1.0

On April 10th, 2013 the winners of the DEVICE Award 1.0 have been announced. In total, 2 projects out of 12 were selected as winners: one in the children area and one in the elderly area. For elderly, the winner is the project “Motivating the elderly to be more active using messaging and progress tracking ” by Jack Ord Rasmussen; whereas in the children area the winner is the paper “Physical-digital Interaction Design for Children” by Kenneth Christensen , Mikkel Andersen, Erik Monsen, Saman Safiri, Jakob Vest Hansen.

The DEVICE Award 1.0 is the first step in order to establish an international EU funded award of excellence for designing for vulnerable generations - children and elderly. A first round of the award has been announced at the Student Interaction Design Research conference SIDER’13 . The work considered for the award were judged in terms of innovation, and human-centric approaches to design, along with the conference theme of empowering people through technology, as well as helping people create technology that empowers themselves or others. The selection criteria for the award are excellence, innovation, and enhancement of the quality of life.

The winners of the award were awarded with a diploma and a NEXUS 7 tablet for each of the six contributing authors. The award is sponsored by the EU funded DEVICE project, and the winners were selected by a committee consisting of members from the project. 

LinkFit: Motivating the elderly to be more active using messaging and progress tracking

Jack Ord Rasmussen

Aarhus University / Eindhoven University of Technology

Email: jack.ord@gmail.com

The project addresses how to motivate elderly to be more physically active, which is a highly interesting subject. The paper presents a prototype of a product intended to motivate residents of a living complex for elderly people to engage in planned physical activities. The prototype is clearly a result of a thorough process in which the elderly residents’ challenges regarding exercise and new technologies have been taken into serious account and are met in a convincing manner. Moreover, feedback on the prototype leads to good and relevant discussions of the product’s usefulness and the viability of its design. All steps of the process are adequately described in the well-structured and well-written paper.

The project promotes innovative or creative design, by involving elderly in the clearly described design process, and by exploring new ways and interesting materials in an interesting way. The design reflects a socially relevant issue. The design quality is high, as there are conscious decisions to do without superfluous details, smart materials are used and these materials support the purpose. The design connects well to its surroundings, and the development has added to the existing range of services.

Physical-digital Interaction Design for Children

Kenneth Christensen , Mikkel Andersen, Erik Monsen, Saman Safiri, Jakob Vest Hansen

Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark

Email: kechr09@student.sdu.dk

The paper describes the design of a social drawing application based on interaction using gestural/natural interaction. The system is aimed at children with and without special needs.

The painting application is based on a Kinect-like system. An Arduino-board is used for additional input (selection of colors, etc). The project was successful and appreciated by a group of children that evaluated it.

The project promotes innovative and creative design, where children were involved in the clearly described design process. New and interesting materials have been creatively used for design explorations in an imaginative way. The design reflects a socially relevant issue, and the materials support the purpose. The project provides access for people with different types and levels of ability.

DEVICE design award @SIDeR 2013

To improve the quality of design for vulnerable generations, the EU funded project DEVICE includes the creation of a design award addressed to design students within its main objectives. As a response to this, this spring in April the best interaction design students will be selected to win the DEVICE design award during the SIDER’13 conference that will take place in Aarhus, Denmark.

The most relevant works- papers, posters and demos - focused on the DEVICE user groups – children and/or elderly – will be judged in terms of level of innovation, human centered approach, social relevance, design methodology and quality.

In addition to this, also the degree of empowerment of society by means of technology, which is the main theme of the conference, will be taken into account. The winner will be awarded with a diploma and a NEXUS 7 tablet.

More information can be found here.

DEVICE – DEsign for Vulnerable generatIons: Children and Elderly

DEVICE is an Erasmus Multilateral Projects funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Program.

DEVICE was launched on the 1st of October 2011 in response to a need recognized by the European Commission to help companiesand academic research centres to focus on vulnerable generations from hardware to software, usability and user-centred design.

The project aspires to bridge traditional industrial design programs with ergonomics, usability concepts and user experience approaches with a specific focus on vulnerable generations.

It intends to address the need to modernize and develop educational programs with a specific focus on vulnerable generations and, ultimately, being a milestone towards the modernization of design education.