Enabling Community Participation of Senior Citizens through Participatory Design and ICT Cristhian Parra. Vincenzo D’Andrea. Giulia Giacomin Community Informatics Conference 2012 #cirn12

From Web-Engineering and Data Knowledge Management to Social Informatics

ICT for Well-Being and a focus on Older Adults

Design and Develop solutions that makes people’s lives a little bit better

Lifeparticipation Example What’s Up

How can we approach Social Interactions? We needed a better understanding of The Elderly World

Research Questions What type of information and activities would elderly share using ICT? What difficulties and challenges do they encounter using ICT?

Research Questions How can we answer our questions using an approach that is as respectful as possible of the people involved, treating them as research collaborators instead of research subjects?

The need for a Participatory Approach

Participatory Laboratory of ICT for Elderly 30 Participants Most aged between 65 and 74 50% at the end 50% returned in the 2 nd edition

Brainstorming What activities are needed to support a magazine What do they know What do they expect to learn

Topics of Interest Pictures. Pictures. Pictures. Writing stories The Internet Interestingly, Blogging.

Weekly scheduling with their participation 3 months. 10 Sessions. Open Office. Internet Browsing. Blogging.

The Blog

32 posts/month 9 active authors Not too much commenting Pair Writing Recipes Excursions Poetry Short Stories Social Report

Follow-Ups Participatory Design Workshops

Follow-Ups Participatory Design Workshops 16 concrete Design Mistakes e.g. mixing sliding and buttons 21 usability notes e.g. make borders thicker and disable touching in them

Community Participation The Result

General Learning ICT can foster Cultures of Participation (for example, around a blog) Participatory Approach enables trust relationships. Diversity of Elderly is wide, and they can be very participative provided the means for participation

ICT Design Learning Step-by-Step sequential interfaces are preferred Desire for sharing their knowledge and stories Love to work in pairs

How to sustain participation? A second edition of the lab More workshops Participatory Design of one ICT tool The Mockup: Future Work

Thanks for listening! Questions? Slides at: