The Kenwood by Senior Star is proud to serve as a valuable senior residential assisted living resource for all Cincinnati families. In the second floor of care building lives movable dementia residents.
Due to the complicated interior environment, taking care of the demented residents becomes more challenged. This project is to rethink the emergency exit door, and figure out a better approach to avoid residents wandering around the emergency exit and coming across it.
Research Strategy
Start with stakeholder mapping and value flow, we benchmarked the existing products and services for demented persons.
Interviews with working staff and observation on residents were soon organized to understand the problem.
A dementia-affected resident's journey was illustrated to envision where the needs lie and where the opportunities are located.
Safety with Humanity
Instead of limit the freedom of residents, we attempted to innovate a desired relationship between residents and staff. That is, creating a living environment with remained dignity and security is the goal of this project.
Solution System
Four concept directions below came out based on the research findings. After several rounds of iterations and user-testing with our clients, we came up with a final integrated solution system based on the four design directions.
Co-design
10 more stakeholders were invited from the Kenwood to test the major solutions including art boxes, do stations and false window. Further, we invited peripheral volunteers to tested prototypes with sensory blockers to simulate a resident’s experience and gain new perspectives.
All the final prototypes have been put into formal use in The Kenwood since August, 2017. The “outdoor room” is on the plan of construction.
Future Opportunities
Potential works need to think about in the future to improve the experiences of residents and their loved ones even all of working staff.
Reflection
This project gave me a valuable opportunity to solve the problem with user-centered design from very beginning to delivery: identification, research, design and future consideration.
When designing a product or service, one straightforward way is to interact with target users. However, for some special reasons, interviewing stakeholders bring great insights as well, particularly in the situation that hard to approach to the target users for designer (so did we in this project).
Additionally, this system design project also taught me that the significance of an integrated solution system to solve a problem. Different from other projects, it gave me more official constraints and challenges but also left me more space to design around.
Lastly, this project led me to deep thought about design for human's future well-being.
Design could be commercial, theoretical or practical, but design must be meaningful and thoughtful.
