Tailoring Technology
New digital technologies can play a key role in addressing well-recognised social and cultural needs of older people, such as loneliness, loss of identity, lack of independence and disconnection from family and friends who increasingly rely on ICT to communicate.
However, many older people have found they can’t engage successfully with ICT because of inaccessibility, complexity, infrastructure incompatibility and unfamiliarity. With support from Nominet Trust, the University of Surrey is aiming to increase all-round understanding of the issues involved by developing a sustainable process of co-design that ensures everyone’s needs are met. The approach is derived from co-design work on the SUS-IT project (link to our webpage) which will be extended in this project to include the involvement of SMEs and start-up companies designing accessible ICT products.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Surrey and the South East Health Technologies Alliance (SEHTA). It was funded by the Nominet Trust. The project ran for 13 months from 1st July 2012. The project was led at Surrey by David Frohlich, with Chris Lim, Peter Lancaster and Diogo Casa Nova.
Publications
Frohlich D.M., Lim C.S. & Ahmed A. (2014) Keep, lose, change: Prompts for the re-design of product concepts in a focus group setting. CoDesign: International Journal of Co-Creation in Design and the Arts, forthcoming.
Courses
Focusgroup+ Re-designing products and services with end users.