Designing a flat to grow old in.

Every one is different and everyone will grow old in different ways. That makes it impossible to design something that will fit everyone who is old. But as we grow old the liklihood that we will incur some impairments increases. This makes it possible to design a base the will work well with most of these impairments.

The entrance to the building which should be at ground level to make it easy for elderly people to get inside irrespective of physical impairment. On the ground floor there could be a cleaning aid for wheelchairs that makes it easy for people in wheelchair to keep the wheelchair and the apartment clean. The stairwell could have ramps instead of stairs to each floor and every floor have a color. In case of an emergency the ramp will work as an emergency exit route for people in a wheelchair.The elevator should be ample so that it i easy to fit more then one person in a wheelchair in the elevator. The floor buttons color should correspond with the color of each floor. This will make it easier for people with cognitive impairments to remember which floor to go to.

The apartment should be roomy so that is possible to use the aid that the persons living in the requires. To ease for people with cognitive impairments each room could have it own color and the door leading to that room can have the same color as the room behind the door. Either the whole door could have that color or maybe just the doorknob depending on the need of the person with cognitive impairments.

The doors should be wide so it is easy to go trough them with a wide wheelchair. The doors should not be regular that just opens in one way. The doors should be sliding or two way door like the picture TwoWayDoor. The doors should be easy to open and not assisted by electronic because of the consequences with an emergency or an outage the doors maybe will become to have to open without assistance for people with an impairment and then trapped inside. With doors like this the thresholds will be eliminated as well

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One problem with locks is the key, it is curtail for open the lock but the key is easily misplaced. Another problem can be to get the key in the lock especially with an visual impairment or a disease that affects your muscle control. The concave lock will make it easier to locate the lock with the lighted circle around it and it will be easier to insert the key in the lock. This does not solve the problem with misplaced keys but it is a good solution for the locks that uses keys.

The hand basin in the bathroom should be adjustable in height and the tap should be intuitive and self explained of how to get cold or warm water and it should be the same way in the whole apartment. The shower should be with a hose and possible to use with a wheelchair so no thresholds. The floor non slippery even when wet. A bathtub that is easy get in and out of should also be in the bathroom.

The picture shows a very good example of how a kitchen to grow old with could look like.

Most of the cupboards at midlevel height so that people with bad backs don’t have to bend and people in a wheelchair can reach. From this picture it’s hard to tell if the two highest cupboards are reachable for a person in an wheelchair. The best thing about this kitchen is that it is beautiful and I feel that this is a kitchen that I could grow old in.

Last lecture – Towards the future

When designing new interfaces the designer should always design for as many people as possible, if the design is intuitive a wider target group is reached. One other important thing to remember when designing interfaces is to be rigorous when programming and using the labels to make it possible to use VoiceOver and other applications that reads the label to the user. And always have in mind to design so that the design will be available for people with impairments.

The designing of interaction should be non excluding and intuitive. I think that design that are intuitive and non excluding will be a successful way of designing.

An interesting thought that strikes me when thinking about designing for the future, what attitude would the generation of the 80’s and 90’s have towards technology when they get old. Will they be playing video games in the home for the elderly, and still use the technology that they use today?

The technological developments last decade have been enormous. The people that are elderly now have been trough a remarkable technological revolution.

So when we are designing for the future we should design for our future self.

Lecture 10 – User Experience Evaluation

The user experience really important. If the users experience of the product is bad it does not matter how good the usability are. The usability is included in the user experience. But there are some possibilities to hide a part of the usability with the user experience.

For example on the experience lecture if we compare the quad and the electric wheelchair. I experience that the quads user experience was a lot better then en electric wheelchairs user experience. The quad was fun and I felt that i can go anywhere, and I felt that the quad had a better usability and user experience. But when i think about it, the electric wheelchair have a better usability because it was possible to go where the quad went but no as fast and not everywhere but almost. Are the quad able to go where the electric wheelchair goes? outside probably everywhere, except where it is to narrow. How about inside the school, can the quad go where the electric wheelchair goes? In very few places such as the entrance yes, but it would not be socially accepted. Everywhere else it to big, loud or to clumsy to go.

This is an example of how the user experience can triumph the usability.

Experience day, reflections

My thought on electric wheelchairs before this lecture was that it would be easy to maneuver and good possibilities to turn the turning-wheels a lot to make it easy to navigate i narrow spaces like a forklift that can turn on dime. As it turns out I got i all wrong! The electric wheelchair was really hard to maneuver in small spaces. It was not possible to turn the turning-wheels more the forty five degrees or something like that. This made the wheelchair clumsy in tricky situations.

But I’m impressed by the off-road qualities of the electric wheelchair, it managed without problems to go off-road in the woods and in the field. An electric wheelchair that can manage that kind of terrain makes it possible for people with impairments to be more free and there by increase their quality of life.

The quad a few notch more powerful. But a few changes need to be make to make it available for as a compliment for an electric wheelchair. The steering is to heavy and there need to be some kind of support to help the person to stay seated on the quad. One bad ting that I noticed about the quad was the big turning radius. If you are not able to look backwards it will be hard to reverse so you need to go forward. How would you turn it around on a small track where is not possible to go off-road and without reversing? But with small changes the quad would make it possible for people with impairments to me even more free and increase their quality of life.

Lecture 9 – Reflections

I really like the idea of the ibot wheelchair. As I felt that one of the big problem of beeing in a wheelchair is that you´re always is seated, and it´s hard to get eye contact. A wheelchair that can raise you up to eye level would ease the life of people in a wheelchair. Since the segway exist the technique would make it possible to have a four wheel wheelchair “stand” on two wheels and be able to move around on two wheels. This would make people in wheelchair able to do more things and increase their independence and lower the stigmatization.

This is a good idea of how i can be designed.

A general feeling I get when I see all the things that are designed for people with physical impairments is that it seems that every designer for those things have missed a crucial part of the design process. The way the thing looks! I haven’t seen one good looking thing, except from a few which have been modified by the owner.

Lecture 7 – Process, Principles and Practices

As Molly Follette writes in Maximizing Usability: The Principles of Universal Design “The next frontier for universal design is industry. We understand universal design in the research and academic communities, but in order to make a different in individual’s qualities of life, we must convince industry to change the way it operates and to accept and adopt the concept of universal design.”

I believe that if the industry will accept and adopt the universal design it would make people with impairments less stigmatized because the things that they use will be usual for people without impairments to use as well. Bur for that industry to change the market will have to change, and the consumers are the market, we are the market. The industry will only change if we’ll make them!

Why exclude people when designing a product? Every designing process should use the principles of universal design and if and only if the goal of the product can not be achieved with out overlooking the principles of universal design. But every product as long as possible should be usable by everyone.

Lecture 8 – Reflections, blind and use the ATM

I have been watching the youtube clip How blind people uses the ATM by Tommy Edison. And there is a couple of things that I find poorly designed and stigmatized.

It seems to be an ATM inside a looked room with the line to the ATM outside that room. So why does he have to bring his own headphones? It should be possible to have speakers on the ATM since it is in a small room, so that blind people can use it even if they forgot their headphones. The biggest problem Tommy has is to find the headphone jack and plug the headphones in. If the ATM had speakers this problem would be eliminated.

How does a blind person interpret the direction of seven a’clock? The directions that are given by the ATM is not very good. The description of the location of the keypad is relative to the headphone jack that was hard to find and it is strange that the ATM does not use the regular system to enter an amount according to Tommy.

The voice of the ATM is not pleasant, why isn’t there a nice pleasant voice?

 

Reflections on lecture 6 – Needs and supportive tools

The exoskeleton robot Ekso is very interesting and I like that there is some progress on this area it make people believe that it anything is possible. I think that it’s fantastic for people who are not able to walk on their own to be able to walk with Ekso. Ekso will make it possible for people do things that they never thought were possible.

The bliss symbols is a really good idea, it was quite easy to understand event though it was the first time I saw it. Which should mean that it will be easy to someone else, to understand the bliss symbols and therefor be able to communicate with people that uses bliss symbols. This would make it possible for doctors, physiotherapists and other people to be able to communicate and help people that uses bliss symbols.

The risks with high-tech solutions could be that the solutions is that they could be to advanced for the user to use. That it takes more time to learn to use the product then the time the product will save the user. I believe that it’s very important for high-tech solutions to be easy and simple to use.

Blind man group – Problem description

Imagine what it would be like to go shopping for groceries without being able to see. How would you know where to start, where are the different groceries you need in the store? Who do you even know where you are? Will you be able to find your way out of the labyrinth called supermarket?

Some products in the store can easily be identified by touch such as most of the fruits and vegetables. But finding the right product of the right brand is difficult without help from someone who is able to see and can read the labels. How would you know if you are holding a can of mushrooms or a can of corn? Can you feel the difference? Can you taste the difference or can you hear the difference? No! 285 million people around the world struggle with this every day. The grocery stores have no aid, as far as we know, for the visually impaired, in Sweden, today.

Not being able to buy your own groceries make you dependent of someone else. How would you feel if you always have to adapt your shopping to someone else’s calendar, probably not very independent.

We believe that there is room for a solution for people with vision impairment to shop for groceries in a smooth and easy way.

Hopefully a solution to this will not deprive anyone of their social interaction with people, but just work as an aid if a person wants to feel more independent.

Blind man group

Our first project meeting was a brainstorming session where we made a small mind map of different impairments and the problems they cause. We then discussed possible solutions for different problems and opted out one impairment at a time until only three were left, Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and blindness.

Tourette’s syndrome is hard to make a good general design solution to since it is such a broad impairment type, which has many different problems that require different solutions. For that reason Tourette’s syndrome was also opted out of the discussion.

When it comes to Parkinson’s disease it is easy to only think about the shakes and muscle weakness that Parkinson’s is known for. But there is much more on the inside. These symptoms can be hard to reduce with a technical solution and should be treated with different methods.

We came up with an interesting thought to make a smartphone app that can help people with their daily life. The smartphones are filled with functions that should be able to help blind people. The smartphones can be controlled by voice with Siri or S-voice and location possibilities.

 

Blind man group consists of Conny Andersson, Jonatan Moritz and Mikael Svärdstrom