Over the last decade there has been an evolving field of co-design with the aim to facilitate an exchange between design teams, and those for whom they are designing. With an aim of facilitation there are explorations into how these conversations can occur, as well as a growing numbers of tools which value people as the experts of their own experiences. Grey but Mobile is a project that explores such exchanges. This collaborative research offers the opportunity to explore how co-design tools can encourage elderly people to express their expertise, and furthermore how such empathic knowledge can be used as a shared reference for collaboration and creating new things together. Based on extensive experience with collaborative workshops in the Grey But Mobile project, this paper explores how metaphors can play a role to gather empathic knowledge, and suggests a workshop programme to prototype such use of metaphors. This joint experience offers the opportunity for participants to experience a metaphorical mapping and explore together the value it brings to knowledge exchange activities between academia and (creative) industry partners.
author: Heather Daam, Maartje van Gestel, Bas Raijmakers
CRISP project: Grey but Mobile
prototype: Empathic Adventure