Fifteen older adults from Klang Valley, between 60 and 85, attended the pilot workshop that saw the deployment of speculative design as a qualitative research methodology for drawing out issues that are of greatest concern to senior citizens in urban areas (as shown in the images above).
The purpose of this pilot workshop is to test out the effic acy of speculative design for the purpose at hand while also experimenting with the best way for introducing and developing the process of speculative design with stakeholders. Care was taken to ensure that all proper ethical considerations have been met.
One of the greatest challenges involved getting near equal participation from all the workshop participants, by keeping the more vocal and active ones from dominating the conversation while also keeping an eye out for potential triggers.
In the process of going through three sets of activities during the course of the day, the objective of identifying how social iso lation features in the life of older adults morphed into a broader outstanding issue of which social isolation is still an unequivocal part : the need for a sustainable healthcare system that integrates well with all other public and private infrastructures already available and not yet implemented, as well as conditions of existing social relations.
The research team learned to reconsider their prior assumptions and to tweak how such a workshop should be conducted in the future, with the feedback provided by the participants. A diversity of useful output was generated which assisted the researchers in improving on the original hypotheses made, and to help in refining the research questions.
More detailed information on the workshop activities, can be found in the document below.
Emmanuel Tsekleves