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Hi, I'm Julian and this is my doctoral project in three minutes.

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As people get older, they tend to go outside less,

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walk shorter distances, and reduce their community participation.

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Can technological interventions play a role in countering this trend,

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and if so, what might they look like?

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I focused on the three areas of fostering exploration of one's urban environment,

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playfully designed public spaces, and activity support for older adults.

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There's plenty of prior work for each of these areas,
and even for where each pair of them intersects,

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but not for the combination of all three.

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So I decided on designing and evaluating a system that uses public screens of different kinds

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for activity support geared towards older adults and structured around quests as a game design element.

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I conducted a review of existing literature and drew upon responses to a custom questionnaire

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to formulate a list of nine overarching requirements.

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From there I came up with a concept that uses large screens for activity information and selection

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and small screens for pedestrian navigation assistance,

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all run by a central service that knows enough about the urban space

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to safely guide people towards activities that fit their mobility profile.

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Get information about available quests and other activities at a large screen,

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drag them onto your personal pinboard to activate,

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and receive navigation assistance from small screens while you're on your way, if you want it.

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By the way, this is all published as free software and you can try it out on my website if you'd like,

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including a browser-based demo.

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Part of doing design science is checking systematically whether your ideas actually work.

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My plan was to conduct a three-step evaluation of increasing complexity and duration.

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However, this process was planned in early 2020, and you might remember something else that happened that year,

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which made working with older adults in public spaces untenable. Yeah, that plan was scrapped.

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With masks and disinfectant in hand, I decided to do what I could to evaluate my system

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in a controlled environment with one person at a time.

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I conducted interactive tests with real participants

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resulting in about four hours of interviews plus additional written feedback.

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People generally described the navigation support and the quest system as helpful,

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but opinions were split on whether material rewards for quest participation were a good idea.

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To make up for some of what my real-world evaluations could have been,

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I ran simulations of pedestrians moving through path networks where some crossings offer navigation assistance.

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It turns out that as you increase the network size,

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the effectiveness of the navigation assistance drops off sharply even for the same relative support density.

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Combining the results from my evaluations and simulations, I concluded with a list of nine design recommendations for interactive systems of this kind.

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Alongside the activity support concept itself, these are my central research result.

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All of my own published articles, including most things presented here, are available in full on my website for free.

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Thank you for watching!