Abstract
In March 2020 the United Nations published an open brief for the creative community to propose interventions to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. However, when faced with unprecedented wicked problems such as these, the rigour of design and creative processes can tested. COVID-19 has demonstrated how important human centred design responses are in understanding the worldviews and ecosystems of users. Ad hoc design responses or design hacks have demonstrated that they have a role to play in how we create our future individual, community and societal ecosystems. In terms of age friendly design, this pandemic makes us envision what should be, furthermore, how we could create better products and services through technology. For our ageing communities ‘Cocooning’ and other social restriction measures have exposed technological deficiencies for the needs of older people and opens up questions of our future preparedness for a growing ageing society. Now more than ever, designers need to understand the behavioural mind-set of older people in their own ecosystem and understand existing mental models. In this opinion piece we posit what acts of design hacking can lead us to greater understanding of users mental models and therefore better understanding of technology needs for both older and younger adults. While presenting various examples of how design hacking is conducted by citizens and participants alike, it shows that it offers designers differing perspectives, experiences and inspiration for technology.
Highlights
COVID-19 and creative responses COVID-19 is the unwelcome visitor at a dinner party, and has it arrived at our door steps without an invitation or a dessert (Marston et al, 2020), it is impacting our various ecosystems from the individual, to the community, towns, cities, countries and continents at unprecedented rates and behaviour
While various individual and collective ecosystems (Marston & van Hoof, 2019; Sheerman et al, 2020) attempt to adjust to some kind of normality taking each day at a time, we see the impact of COVID-19 has on our individual communities
Conclusions and implications for future research In the current societal ecosystem that we have found ourselves in, design methods and processes can be applied to a vast array of problems
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. In this opinion piece we posit what acts of design hacking can lead us to greater understanding of users mental models and better understanding of technology needs for both older and younger adults. While presenting various examples of how design hacking is conducted by citizens and participants alike, it shows that it offers designers differing perspectives, experiences and inspiration for technology. This article is included in the Healthier Lives gateway. This article is included in the Fairer Society gateway. This article is included in the Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection
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