Brief

In this course, we were working with elderly members of the Balthazar Project – a project that brings older and younger people together to build projects and learn from one another. We learned to identify and understand opportunities for new intergenerational services, products, or experiences that interweave the needs and potentials of retired people with the needs and potential of younger adults.

Process

At the beginning of our two-week research phase, we decided to go into field research with the aim of exploring the theme of loneliness and understanding the way in which elderly and younger generations form their circles of care.

We conducted two in-depth interviews with a retired engineer from Denmark and a young immigrant from Germany, an expert interview with a student caretaker at an elderly home in the Netherlands, and guerrilla interviews at an elderly fitness center run by Aeldresagen. During our interviews we used a customized ‘loneliness graph’ tool and took the respondents through card-sorting exercises.

After synthesizing the interview data, we came upon two insights:

• In order to generate a feeling of home away from home, people look for friends who can transform into substitute family members.
• Due to their varying lifestyles and responsibilities, it takes a lot more effort for people in different stages of life to take the first step in establishing new friendships.

Based on the insights from the first week we came up with a design question and ideated around it during a co-creation session with the elderly members of Balthazar. Our design question was:

How might we connect people from different generations whose close family members are absent, so that they can play these roles in each others’ lives and simulate the feeling of home.

Result

After going through and clustering the 45 different concepts generated through our ideation sessions, we landed upon a final concept and refined it further. It’s called Dinner Makes Home, a service that connects young professionals who are too busy to cook for themselves and crave a home made dinner, with the elderly in their neighborhoods who live alone and are looking eat with someone.

Contribution

Apart from conception I was in particular involved in research, scenario development, running the experience prototyping sessions and directing the video documentation.