Claire Craig's research while affiliated with Sheffield Hallam University and other places

The move into residential aged care is a difficult transition for many people. The place may be called an aged-care or nursing "home", but for many residents it does not feel like a home at all. This paper explores issues experienced by older people who are trying to make themselves at home in aged care. The authors present two studies examining residents' perceptions of the aged-care environment. The findings suggest that residents experience significant challenges. Residents' identities are influenced by their ability to keep treasured objects and personalise their rooms, and the design and accessibility of communal areas influences residents' willingness to spend time in them. For many residents, their private spaces are more appealing than communal areas, resulting in extended time alone in their rooms. However, personal items have to be discarded due to space issues and/or private rooms can become cluttered with personal items and become difficult to use. The authors suggest that much can be done to improve the design of aged-care homes and enable residents to feel more at home. Of particular importance is providing ways for residents to personalise their living space and make it feel homelike.

This article describes a tangible interface for an e-coach, co-designed in four countries to meet older adults’ needs and expectations. The aim of this device is to coach the user by giving recommendations, personalized tasks and to build empathy through vocal, visual, and physical interaction. Through our co-design process, we collected insights that helped identifying requirements for the physical design, the interaction design and the privacy and data control. In the first phase, we collected users’ needs and expectations through several workshops. Requirements were then transformed into three design concepts that were rated and commented by our target users. The final design was implemented and tested in three countries. We discussed the results and the open challenges for the design of physical e-coaches for older adults. To encourage further developments in this field, we released the research outputs of this design process in an open-source repository.

The emerging Design for Health (D4H) field has considerable potential to identify and address existing challenges faced by healthcare systems. D4H is a challenging environment for designers (and others who desire to ‘do things differently’) to work in. D4H projects require transdisciplinary approaches, making it more difficult for those who come from different perspectives to work effectively together. This paper reflects on the challenges and opportunities of those working in the field and describes the development of a practical toolkit to support teams embarking on D4H projects.

This chapter describes the Design Research contribution to the NESTORE Horizon 2020 project, which adopted a participatory design research method, called ‘exhibition in a box’, developed by the authors which is predicated on ‘thinking through things’. Over 100 older people across four countries participated in the study, which sought to develop a virtual digital coach to support active ageing. We discuss themes that arose relating to the barriers and enablers to engagement with technology as identified by participants within the study. It critically reflects on the strengths and challenges of the co-design methodology. The methodological approach followed in NESTORE provides for users to be involved in the design of the solution throughout the project duration and permeates the work of all the work-packages. The reason for non-acceptance of health technologies is complex and the context where the technologies will operate and how they relate to the end users’ lives are key factors to uptake and utilization. Researchers have suggested that the poor design of many devices and subsequent non-uptake may be directly attributed to the failure of technologists to engage end users and elicit understanding of their requirements. To date few studies have articulated how this might be achieved.

Ethics are a system of moral principles and branch of knowledge enquiry defining what is good for individuals and society. Academic disciplines operate within publicly defined ethical parameters created to support researchers through complex dilemmas. However, paradigms in interdisciplinary research, a growing focus on emancipatory and participatory methods and questions relating to an ethic of technology call for a rethinking of existing frameworks that are largely predicated on bioethics. This paper describes an enquiry that used a design-lens through which to explore existing ethical frameworks operating in health. An Ethical Roadmap resource was created in response to issues and questions raised during the enquiry. We suggest that the Roadmap creates the space for discourse, discussion and a level of rehearsal as potential ethical dilemmas are encountered and responses are worked through. The process potentially enables a reflective and reflexive process that may build self-awareness of how researcher values may manifest themselves in particular contexts and from the different disciplinary backgrounds of members within a team. We describe the Ethical Roadmap as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘finite’ and as a solid starting point from which researchers can develop the resource offering further, through use, introducing the open source version of the Roadmap.

This article details the development of a live design research project working with people who are bereaved, people who are living with dementia and people who are approaching end of life. The project aims to support people to continue bonds with others in anticipation of and following death. It centres on the idea of ongoingness and using art, design and digital technologies in gentle, personally meaningful ways.