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Design for Agile Aging: An Interdisciplinary Course
Maintaining mobility is a critical component to successful aging. Impaired mobility can limit normal activities of daily living and lead to a loss of independence. For individuals who are already mobility impaired, or are at risk of becoming so, small improvements in functional capacity or mobility can dramatically improve quality of life. Novel intervention strategies targeting issues related to mobility in the elderly could fill a vital need.
In the Winter and Spring Quarters of 2008, Anne Friedlander and her colleagues, Carol Winograd, Terry Winograd and Paul Yock will team teach a class designed to develop new strategies and products to enhance mobility in seniors. This two-quarter interdisciplinary sequence will be offered by the d.school (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford) in association with the Stanford Center on Longevity. Graduate, undergraduate and medical students from diverse backgrounds will be recruited to participate in this unique and innovative class experience. The class will bring perspectives from Computer Science, Design, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Medicine address the potential of people to maintain vitality and mobility as they age. The projects will find novel ways to integrate computer and device technologies with behavioral and social interventions.
In the Winter quarter, students will learn about the relevant background from experts in the different disciplines, including Computer Science, Physiology, Geriatrics, Psychology, and BioDesign. They will also experience design thinking through smaller “trial voyage” projects that give them confidence in the design process. The Winter quarter projects will focus on needfinding and the formulation of initial design concepts. Selected projects will then be developed into a series of prototypes and tests during the Spring quarter.
During the Spring Quarter, small teams will do projects that develop their ideas in all dimensions –technical interventions, social and contextual design, organizational contexts, business, and distribution issues. Our goal is for the students to produce designs that have an impact in the world – through products, programs, and practices that affect people’s health on a broad scale.
In both quarters, a key part of the learning will be student group exercises and activities that facilitate understanding the issues of aging as well as the design process. Each class session will include a lecture and an activity targeted on these deliverables.
Projects will have the general theme of maintaining mobility, but the specific context in which to do needfinding and design may change from year to year. For example, in consecutive years, the class might focus on assisted living facilities, or people being discharged from hospitals, or senior day centers. A summer course-design workshop (August 2007) is planned for associated faculty to identify the target population for the first year and to determine ways to facilitate student access and learning.
Innovative and viable projects that are designed during the class may subsequently be supported and developed by the SCL in order to bring them to market.