So many amazing stories!
The students were busy during the last two weeks meeting with some very charismatic and interesting elderly people. We got a taste of the beautiful things everyone heard and observed and set to work with some great guests to make sense of it all.
Marie de Vos and Maaike Schuitema kicked us off with some great examples of design research in action, and what they do at STBY with all their valuable research. This set the tone of students to externalize all their new knowledge and finally share with the group what they saw as the most important stories they captured.
We created a collection of stories about many important aspects of elderly mobility; aids, informal care, services, getting help, facing challenges, previous experiences, shame, pride, preparation and change.
A few early examples:
Greetje goes every week to the hair salon three blocks from her house by taxi. The destination of this journey is very important for her to keep social contact in her life.
Non and Leo go together to a mall all the way in Amersfoort because they are certain there is a handicapped toilet for Non to use. During their first visit there, they discovered a group of Indonesian elderly people who gather in the McDonalds regularly, and thus began a routine visit to this mall.
Jeanne got a new walker and was too embarrassed to use it, so for the first time she drove to a different city to test it out.
This coming week the students will be busy working on editing their micro-stories. We look forward to a movie watching day next week.