SCOPE Team 2016-2017:
For my Senior Capstone at Olin College,our sponsor tasked our team of five students to design a product that is in the intersection of food. aging ,and technology. Through user visits and paper research we explored the lives and experiences of older adults. Form our research we developed design artifacts that capture the needs, values, and attitudes of our user group. We work to understand what it means to grow old and how relationships with food change as adults age.
Disclaimer this project is under NDA and some discoveries cannot be discussed further. |
Note on Users:
As we have worked on this project, we realized one thing. Everybody will become "old", or is currently "old". This means that when we look for our preferred "user", we are looking at potentially everybody. This is scary in terms of a design challenge; designing for everybody is a daunting task. Plus, it is best practice to not design for yourself- it is easy to let your own personal experiences cloud your judgement. When a user group is too close to your personal experiences, it can be difficult to disassociate your family, friends, and personal experiences with, in this case, aging. We as a team have had to find situations that are different than our own, and constantly have had to push our beliefs. Just because we have seen how one person ages, we must accept that there is a world full of people with experiences different than our own. It is our task to filter and develop sound research that best captures our user group.
Travel to Japan:
In order to explore the Japanese context, we visited Japan in the Winter of 2016. During our visited we visited Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kawasaki. We presented the Fall semester's findings to our Sponsor and learned more about the work they were doing. Our team wanted a video to capture what we experienced and explored.