Reflecting on a Smart City Project for Older Adults

Introduction: UrbanLife+

urbanlifeplus.de

• BMBF-funded research project into technology for older adults in urban spaces
• 2015 to 2020, three universities from across Germany, several industry partners in elderly care and urban planning
  • Deployment and evaluation area: Mönchengladbach, Germany
• Results: concepts for “Smart Urban Objects,” guidelines for city planners
• However: we are not here to present the project’s results, but to talk about what we learned regarding research projects for vulnerable groups in urban settings
  • A lot of learning comes from failure, so here is our gallery of things that went badly!

Agenda for this presentation

1. Communication in an interdisciplinary research team
2. Questionnaire study with older adults
3. Participatory design and distributed teams
4. Obstacles during the evaluation phase

1. Communication in an interdisciplinary research team

• UrbanLife+ research consortium: computer scientists, elderly care experts, city planning and development professionals
• Interdisciplinary approaches are valuable, but carry unique challenges
• People speak different “languages” regarding empirical work, methods, prototyping, …
• Problem: if we don’t pay attention, we tend to slip into familiar routines and the different teams drift apart
• Mitigation: regular collaborative vision workshops and goal/approach discussions

2. Questionnaire study with older adults

• UrbanLife+ panel study: questionnaire about living situation,
  health, technology use, other everyday concerns
• Sent to every citizen aged 65+ in the research area (would not be possible to repeat today because of GDPR)
• Problem: a minority of reponses was frustrated in tone, even angry
  • The questionnaire prompted them to reflect on age-related changes to their own lives
  • For some, this resulted in feelings of frustration and helplessness, projected outward as anger towards the survey
• Mitigation: This issue is not altogether avoidable, but remember to approach vulnerable groups with appropriate gentleness and respect for their situations

3. Participatory design and distributed teams

• Participatory design: involve the target user group at every stage of the process
• Early, the Munich team (HCI) was able to coordinate with the Mönchengladbach team (elderly care and populace communication) and establish the Technik-Café, a regular roundtable-style meeting with older residents of a local care home
• But then: when a member of the Munich team who (coincidentally) lived near Mönchengladbach left the project, user participation was reduced significantly
  • Frequent travel to Mönchengladbach had prohibitive organizational obstacles (time, cost, advance planning) for the remaining members
• Problem: the design phase proceeded with scarce user involvement
• Mitigation: colocate design/development and user involvement

4. Obstacles during the evaluation phase

• UrbanLife+’s main evaluation phase coincided with the emergence of COVID-19
• Problem: older participants, public urban spaces, and touch devices were all increased health risk factors
  • As a result, the UrbanLife+ consortium abandoned empirical evaluations almost entirely
• We (the Munich team) ran a smaller-scale evaluation in a controlled outdoor environment with one participant at a time
• Mitigation 1: establish a controlled “outdoor laboratory” setting that can serve as a (limited) substitute for evaluations in the urban space
• Mitigation 2: focus on qualitative empirical methods to more thoroughly understand the full breadth of the participants’ thoughts and feelings

Conclusion

All mitigations summarized:

• Establish regular collaborative vision workshops and
  goal/approach discussions for interdisciplinary teams
• Remember to approach vulnerable groups with appropriate gentleness and respect for their situations
• Colocate design/development and user involvement
• Establish a controlled “outdoor laboratory” setting for evaluations, focus on qualitative empirical methods