This paper describes a participatory design-oriented study of an ambient assisted living system for monitoring the daily activities of elderly residents. The work presented addresses these questions 1) What daily activities the elderly participants like to be monitored, 2) With whom they would want to share this monitored data and 3) How a monitoring system for the elderly should be designed. For this purpose, this paper discusses the study results and participatory design techniques used to exemplify and understand desired ambient-assisted living scenarios and information sharing needs. Particularly, an interactive dollhouse is presented as a method for including the elderly in the design and requirements gathering process for residential monitoring. The study results indicate the importance of exemplifying ambient-assisted living scenarios to involve the elderly and so to increase acceptance and utility of such systems. The preliminary studies presented show that the participants were willing to have most of their daily activities monitored. However, they mostly wanted to keep control over their own data and share this information with medical specialists and particularly not with their fellow elderly neighbours.
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As a result of the COVID-19 measures, many people experienced social isolation and a lack of meaningful contact, especially vulnerable elderly people. For a specific group of musicians specialized in person-centred artistically-led participatory practices in healthcare settings, this sparked the exploration of migrating their live practice online, by making use of video-calling technology. From a ‘lifelong learning’ perspective—which considers musicians as being capable of responding to societal change by creating new, meaningful artistic practices—such a sudden migration from offline to online, under the exceptional circumstances at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, created an instant challenge for the musicians to demonstrate their flexibility and adaptability. On the other hand, the limits caused by the conditions and immediacy of this response, combined with a feeling of diminished humanness in virtual interaction, seemed to jeopardize the person-centred values that the work of this group is built upon.This article explores this issue by expanding on the musicians’ flexibility towards personcentredness and their attempts to safeguard these values when they suddenly switch from a ‘physical’ to ‘virtual’ space.
Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
