Elderly Life Inquiry Toolkit: Empathy Expanding in Elder-Friendly Technology Design

ABSTRACT

ICTs have become deeply ingrained in social life. Design for elder-friendly technology is gaining traction in China to reduce obstacles for older people’s access to smart gadgets and services. Designers must increase their awareness of heterogeneous images of the old and elder technology usage in everyday life to create technological solutions that are meaningful to the aging population. Young designers encounter empathetic difficulties in design practice due to a lack of experience with aging, qualitative research abilities, and training. This research proposed a human-centered Elderly Life Inquiry toolkit to bridge this gap. The toolkit establishes a qualitative research framework of ‘Exploration-Interaction-Reflection,’ together with thematic guidelines, to assist young designers in engaging with the elderly utilizing various empathy techniques. It enhances designers’ empathy for older adults in everyday life, develops qualitative research abilities, and incorporates insights into designs. According to a series of empirical experiments and prototyping involving young student designers and older participants, the qualitative research method of face-to-face intergenerational communication is more suited to Chinese elders’ social preferences. This research demonstrated the process of developing the toolkit and the potential of the research techniques during the COVID-19 outbreak. At last, we emphasize the importance of supporting young designers to engage with diverse older adults, valuing the creativity of multidisciplinary participants, and focusing on the relationship between older life and technology for empathy in technology design. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.