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Painting the ideal home: using art to express visions of technologically supported independent living for older people in north-east England

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Abstract

This paper describes the investigation of the development of future technological products to support older people in everyday living through the agency of a community art group. Recent research has identified a number of challenges facing designers seeking to use traditional participatory design approaches to gather technology requirements data from older people. Here, a project is described that sought to get a group of older people to think creatively about their needs and desires for technological support through the medium of paint. The artistic expression technique described in this article allowed the identification of issues that had also been found by previous research that used a range of different techniques. This indicates that the approach shows promise, as it allows information to be gathered in an environment that is comfortable and familiar using methods already known by the participants and which they find enjoyable. It provides a complement (or possible alternative) to standard protocols and has the potential benefit of extracting even richer information as the primary task for participants is enjoyable in its own right and is not associated with an interrogative process. Furthermore, it is argued that some of the key risks of traditional approaches are lessened or removed by the naturalistic setting of this approach.

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Notes

  1. http://www.seniorwatch.com

  2. Structured motif used to communicate information from or about a computer interface. Earcons are typically arranged in hierarchic families, and the different levels of the hierarchy are used to represent nested or leveled information, with each hierarchic level being mapped to a variation or modulation of the earcon’s parent (e.g., timbre, melodic contour, rhythm, etc.) see [4, 7, 19, 21] for some examples.

  3. UK government Department of Trade and Industry

  4. http://www.onenortheast.co.uk

  5. http://www.codeworks.net

  6. Alston was one of seven locations in the larger ‘Wired up Communities’ programme. The other participants were Blackburn, Brampton, Newham, Manchester, Framlington, and Kensington/Liverpool (see [9] for more detail)

  7. The Delves Lane Community Art Group, Consett, Co. Durham, UK.

  8. This is not wholly surprising, as it can be very difficult to envisage a technology never seen before.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Codeworks Assistive Technology Lab (http://www.codeworks.net/atl/) for funding the work described in this article. We would also like to thank the Delves Lane Community Art Group in Consett, Co. Durham for engaging with the task so enthusiastically. Finally we would like to acknowledge the input of our colleague Dr Gill Green for introducing us to the art group.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Engineering, and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Paul Vickers, Linda Banwell & Susan Heaford

  2. Informática Escuela Politécnica Superior, Madrid, Spain

    Fausto J. Sainz de Salces

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  1. Paul Vickers
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  2. Linda Banwell
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  3. Susan Heaford
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  4. Fausto J. Sainz de Salces
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Correspondence to Paul Vickers.

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Vickers, P., Banwell, L., Heaford, S. et al. Painting the ideal home: using art to express visions of technologically supported independent living for older people in north-east England. Univ Access Inf Soc 8, 33–47 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-008-0126-z

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