Today we had our first lecture of the year, building upon our introductory lecture from last week.
Our project this year which I covered in a recent blog post, is to design a product targeted at the over sixty-five year olds. It is a difficult target market to design for because unless you spend a lot of time with grandparents or people of that age category, it can be fairly difficult to relate to the kind of problems that these people are faced with.
What we covered today is further enhancing our knowledge on product research. In the first few minutes it was quickly established that in our class “We are all on the same team“, we are facing real world problems and as a whole we are tackling the wants and needs.
The products we design will therefore:
- Have focus
- Matter
- Deserve to exist.
We also covered a bit on empathy and why it is important when it comes to applying this to designing products.
The capacity to think and feel oneself into the the inner life of another person.
As mentioned in the quote above which is a definition of empathy, it is important because it allows us to understand the kind of people we are designing for.
The empathic design toolkit which we can use in our research follows the process of:
- Ask
- Look
- Try
- Learn
We then split up into groups to try and gain a deeper understanding of the kinds of people we may be dealing with in terms of primary research.
We were given some glasses which simulated impaired vision as a result of ageing for someone over the age of sixty-five. The glasses were 20/60 – two level two’s (acuity and contrast loss). When I put on the glasses and was told that it is acceptable to drive with that level of eyesight, the immediate knee-jerk reaction was wow, how is that even remotely safe! Everything seemed blurry, even people sat in front of me, it was very difficult to make out specific facial expressions.
In conjunction, I was told to try on a pair of gloves which simulate the effects of extreme arthritis. The task I was given (whilst wearing the glasses) was to fit a charger into a phone. First of all, it was near impossible to make out where the hole on the phone was. Eventually when I found the hole, the charger didn’t fit. After I had taken off the gloves and glasses, I was shown on the side of the phone a very minuscule hole.
What I learnt from this especially wearing the gloves that simulated extreme arthritis was that:
- It tells us exactly where the pressure points are
- It was very difficult to grip objects without a mass degree of pain
- It was easy to observe how movement can become restricted
- It was very easy having worn the gloves to objectify where the pain took place
- (Coupled with the glasses) when it is impossible to make out that there is another hole to charge a phone, it can lead people to believing that it is the wrong charger
- It is about contrast and size
Later on in the day we tackled ethics and what the term ethics means, how it will be important when it comes to our research and gaining consent from the people being observed, photographed, recorded, etc.
Finally, we discussed the importance of a literature review and why this is relevant to our product research module.