and I was really really pleased with this project
in that they did a ton of prototyping on what they needed to what they needed to do to make
it work and so it's not kind of a theoretical thing they actually discovered their first
assistive device would throw you out of the chair and that was really worthwhile finding out
that's the bottom in the middle is the final prototype and that's a that's a fake computer
image of it they never built one to look quite that good but they did make it work.
Another medical dispensing device where someone can carry their medicines with them and they're
not you know it's like you can do the one in the kitchen but you could also do one
where someone gets to take it with them and it reminds them and it dispenses it properly
again a lot of prototyping and then this is actually my last slide so I'm well under 10
minutes I believe you'll be very thankful for that so another walker that this actually won in
first place at a Stanford competition for designing for the elderly
and then somebody found it on the internet and ripped it off
yeah so anyway that's the kind of thing that we do we don't deal so much with
place we deal with activities and what we call perceived needs and you know user wants
okay I'm done okay sure that's it do I if I close this will the whole thing die I don't
us know
ah now well I'm going to click on got it first because I always click when it
asks me to say got it oh stop sharing how's that
I haven't been teaching in the last two years and you guys actually made me nervous
oh god I forgot room it's up here if you folks want to come up we won't bite
I'm pretty short in here can you guys all hear me okay so hello everyone just a reminder I'm
Elif I'm with interior design so what I'm gonna pick up where Ed left where he was talking about
perceived needs and today I'm gonna talk about two studies if I have the time and this is about
actually how all the adults pursue their housing related needs and the first study that I'm
going to talk about is that a one that actually collaborated with Nancy and a couple other design
faculty and we look into how interior design or assistive design products can support aging
in place but in active way so just to give you a little bit of background to why he did what we did
we all know that people want to age in place so according to a recent survey from last year
we know that more than three quarters of people who are age 50 and older they want to age in place
and according to projections in the next 10 years or so you know that
let me see I think about 60 of those people will have limited mobility and they will be living with
three or more chronic conditions and from the other side when you look at the housing stock
only about 3.5 percent of the existing housing stock is currently accessible
from the accessibility perspective they have the nostalgia signal level living widened hallways
and on the other side when you look at this construction trends in the housing industry we
are still building homes with two or more stories so if those people actually want the agent place
in a safe and healthy and viable way we need to do something with the home so that we can
accommodate their needs and preferences so with that perspective we started this study and adding
a layer on that when you look at older adults they are the least physically active group of all
and they are the most it's okay I'm not taking it personally they are the most sedentary group and
we know that physical activity is a big thing and most of these people they spawn 80 to 90 percent
of their time in their homes so if they're going to be physically active some or most of the stuff
has to happen in the homes so as designers we are looking into how the design of the houses
what we put in now the modifications how we can support an active lifestyle in the homes
and an approach in the literature for that is called active living and active aging so on top of
physical exercise physical activity active living includes integrating all sorts of
physical activity to daily chores so when you do gardening when you do household work and do
your laundry when you use your stairs to go up and down they all count as physical activity
so we are kind of looking into how we can support it by design and with those home modifications
they are costly things most of the time and for older adults the median income is for 65
and older it's 24,000 and currently Medicaid and Medicare do not cover all modifications so in a
sense it is a social justice issue to be able to provide those types of services to those people
and we also kind of know that with those modifications whether they are like simple
accessibility level modifications or smart technologies about half of the time those
things are rejected by other adults and there are different reasons for that so we wanted to see
we approached it from the perspective of older adults and we want to see their perceptions of
how design can support active living at homes what factors influence those and whether those
income levels affordability issues come into play in those decisions so what we did is
we did a survey we did we conducted a survey in Virginia with older adults and we conducted
this survey online and in person and we signed it up through the Virginia Tech's registry to
more than 200 people but since we also wanted to include people from the lower income ranges we
went to the meal sites meal distribution sites and we collected data from those older adults as well
and after that we did a focus group study so
we were looking at active living so there are different ways of active living we
included a bunch of products some of it that you can see over here so we looked into stuff for
example related to steer mobility we looked into environmental controls and one knuckle sensors we
included smartphone technologies at different levels of things including lighting including full
home automation things so from those categories we wanted to see if there's a difference
if there is a particular group of active learning supportive design products that ordered us to feel
more positively or negatively and why would that following that we were also wondering
whether how people get information about these designs or products made a difference because
when you look at the literature we know that one of the reasons to reject those modifications
is lack of information or how the information is presented so we were also trying to figure out
if they half percent information if they were able to test those products see those products learn
what they do if their attitudes or intentions to adopt those things will change over time
and we did a focus group and see what matters and what actually is related to those decisions
so just to give you a couple highlights from our survey findings
as we expected age made a difference so the older you get the more negative you are approaching to
those things income levels made a difference if you are independent in your activities of your if
you needed assistance it made a difference if you are tech savvy in terms of having
an internet connection having a smartphone knowing how to use stuff for the smartphone
technologies it made a difference in terms of smartphone technologies from the industry side
there's a push and from the research side we know that some of those things actually work
but there's this cost side of things these things are costly so perceived affordability
made a difference in terms of whether all the adults will buy into those products or not
and from all those products that we looked into the ones that are most affordable and
the most low-tech like amber lighting or non-slip ice carpet those things that
in an expected way were the ones that were viewed most positively among older adults so there's
the smart home products and there's the low tech ones that can actually make a difference increase
safety and security but they're also affordable so they're still viewed a lot more positively
and when we did focus groups a couple main teams emerged so one of them people evaluate
those things from a false perspective poles is a big thing for older adults so they think about
if it's going to prevent any falls if it's going to pose a flood risk so they kind of look at those
products from that perspective and aesthetics is a big thing there's still this stigma against
disability so they're looking at those things and asking okay is this look like a normal handrail or
can i paint it to customize it so that it's going to look normal or can i put it away if someone
is coming to visit me so there's still that stigma that is happening in making those decisions
they were also wondering if they can customize those design products
according to their needs so there's that person environment fit issue in that
for the smart products there is this technology skepticism so is the technology going to fail
can i learn how to use it do i have to remember stuff and on top of that as expected there are
the privacy concerns because there are going to be a privacy breach so it's going to make me more
vulnerable and they also know that with the technology things are changing so
fast so some of those investments may be obsolete in a couple of years
so they are thinking even for the ones who are not on the low income range they're thinking if they
if I have to sell my house will I have a return on investment is it gonna be is it gonna work my
investment so is it just am I doing it for myself or is it something that I can actually financially
have some gains in the future so those are some of the things that popped up from our focus group
finance and as I said I'm going to see these parts a little bit in terms of active living categories
we also found that then those products or design teachers if they're related to safety
people are willing to pay for it a little more so even if they are not the most affordable products
if they see that that's something that's going to increase their safety like those
environmental smart environmental controls and such they are willing to pay for those things
and yes there are some differences for our meal site participants versus the higher
income well-educated groups but those are the things that are actually pretty common
and they were also talking about medicaid doesn't cover it so what's gonna do okay so I'm just going
to show you like two slides and I'm going to just kind of wrap it up this is a very different study
but in my mind this is also related because in our survey we found that one of the most
favorite products was where amber night lights
so how many of you have heard like you're not supposed to expose yourself to blue wavelengths
at night night time so I mean for older adults that's also a critical issue because they wake
up more often they get up and they go around they go to the kitchen to get some water
or just they may go to the bathroom and stuff so there are lighting guidelines for those things and
it's recommended that you have to use amber lights or red lights and you have to provide a little
bit of lighting just for safety reasons but if you look at those metrics I don't know from the screen
to next time you can see them there are three images there the very first one is an image and
that is that's a fish eyelash photography and then those lines that you see over there is like our
kind of vision so that's how you would see that from a camera view if you look at the second one
it is when the light levels are so low you have no color perception so you just kind of take out
the color content and in the third one it is the distribution of the light so the point for this
study is actually to develop a visual perception based metric the standards that we have they talk
about like and quantity but it's not what you see your materiality your surface reflectances
your colors matter in terms of how you see those things when you look at older adults there is this
vision loss the visual acuity losses contrast sensitivity losses colors perception muscles
etc this is a simulation of severe vision loss so we are looking into how you can quickly and in a
cost-effective way assess lighting conditions with the goal of actually revising those like
metrics for actual human perceptions so I'm gonna stop here so that's nice you can kind of pick
anything when I left off so I'm just gonna stick to the doors you know I'm gonna stand up because
I just can't see everybody how about the camera lady that doesn't mess you up I'll just hold this
all right so I'm actually going to talk about age friendly communities I'm a bigger picture person
than what you've heard here but what I'm going to say does tie into some of the comments that both
Ed and Elif have talked about an age-friendly community is a livable community that also
has a focus on the needs and wants of the older residents so that they have the services and
supports that they need to successfully age in place or to remain as independently as possible in
their homes okay so you can be a livable community and not an age-friendly community believe it or
not you can people will say oh well we're life span friendly well older adults do have needs you
know and an age-friendly community is one that really does address the needs of older adults
so I've been lucky enough in the last year and a half to work with the local office on aging
in Roanoke and the city of Roanoke and the city is very interested in being an age-friendly city okay
so we were charged with conducting a survey to ask residents are we a good place to live enrolled and
if not or if so what do we need to do to make it better for older adults see pretty simple premise
so we actually conducted a survey and this is the model that we use to guide our survey questions
and being a researcher I want to remind all of you as you do any surveying you should have a
model guiding your questions so you don't go down the path of useless questions but in our model we
used the built environment where it says under city and neighborhood we asked 24 questions
about the built environment is it these features available and how important are they to you you've
heard of those types of questions before planning people use those all the time we asked about
affordability and safety their perceptions about that and the urban planning literature
has indicated that these are important to livable communities so that's why we
we included them in here the public health literature also agrees with that and they
suggested we also added resident characteristics not just demographics but how long have you lived
here what's your health habits your wellness habits you know where do you live what kind
of building you know all this sort of thing so we ask a whole lot on resident characteristics
and lastly there's a new literature that's coming up more on neighborhoods which in some of your
work here maybe you recognize that neighborhood is very important to livable communities so we asked
questions about what neighborhood do you live in as well as your relationships with your neighbors
and do you feel respected and do you feel for you have this perception that they will help you in a
time of need and you will help them okay um so we asked that now the city of Roanoke why this
was an ideal piece here the city of Roanoke has 49 designated neighborhoods you know people say
hey I live in old southwest hey I live in Gilmore hey I live in Dyerly you know these there's even
little signs you know when you go down the street like welcome to Loudon you know so that's great
you know we ask people what neighborhood they live in and then we can analyze this by neighborhoods
well best intentions but anyway you'll find out more about that in a minute so here's our model we
were lucky enough to survey 623 residents age 45 and older okay we're not going to ask young people
if lo rolando is a good place to live and grow old you know that's that's just silly business
so let's ask people in the second half of life age 45 on them and you know our participants were
age 45 to 97 and all of them were independent living people these were not people in assisted
living not in nursing home they were all actually in relatively good health and just a plug for
technology we did this online and face to face we did a lot of targeted convenience sampling
but we used the Nextdoor app which some of you may have heard of Roanoke is plugged into that we use
that to advertise the survey and a third of our adults 65 and older a third used the online survey
okay so older adults are not afraid of technology if they know how to use them all right and our
oldest uh participant online was 84. okay so it was a good survey representative of the city all
right yes big finding here Roanoke is a good place to live and grow old okay that was the number one
question we wanted answered often at the start 83 of people rated it as excellent very good or good
we also ask people is your neighborhood great how your neighborhood is a good place to live
and grow older because we are interested in that neighborhood component and you know 81 percent of
the participants said their neighborhood was a good place to live and grow old now when we looked
at the participants who rated fair and poor and you always should look at that other group that
what they're thinking we're looking for significant factors like who are these people can
we create a profile so then we can target them to make life better for them and you know what they
are a diverse group and we never could really pinpoint who they were they were not necessarily
in poor health or disabled or felt disrespected disenfranchised we couldn't figure that out so
that remains a mystery and for the next study i guess so first of all great place to grow
another descriptive finding that i want to share with you is this one which is
real common your regional planner people most important city features again we
had 24 features listed here's just the top 15. and it's pretty cool how they kind of group together
all right the roadways meaning street sidewalks intersections that's all considered roadway top
five the next were public transportation Roanoke has a bus system as well as a trolley system
near the medical school then came public spaces but it was public parking spaces and
accessible buildings in the public spaces then another roadway intersection thing
and look at poor housing the first time housing came up was number 15 on the list
in importance now asking this question is important it is important for regional planners
to say hey this is what's on people's minds you know this will help us prioritize but it doesn't
tell us what makes Roanoke a great place to live and grow old so I wanted to show this to you
because I'm going to show you the results of our predictive model and how there is a big difference
what makes Roanoke a good place to grow old and as you pursue your own research careers if you do you
remember this and here's our predictive findings what predicted that Roanoke is a good place to
live and grow old well as you can see here there's a lot of features but number one the neighborhood
this was the biggest factor by far if people perceived their neighborhood was a good place to
live and grow old then the city was a good place to live and rural okay that clearly and I forget
what the variance to explain this was but it's very large then um affordable if people thought
if they perceive now this is perception if they thought the city was an affordable place to live
they thought it was a good place to live then there were some outdoor features they thought
contributed and what were those specifically all you landscape people please take note
parks public spaces with benches and sidewalks in good condition okay that that was really high
on the list and now I'm diverging here a little but we do know that in livable communities social
interaction is extremely important you know and to promote that and what do all three of those
things promote social interaction okay so people are saying you know what if we have access to
open spaces parks we have benches to sit down and watch the world go by or to talk with our friends
sidewalks the connectivity is a huge issue in Roanoke there's sidewalks and then there's no
sidewalks and then there's sidewalks and then they have sidewalks to get to places then there can be
social interaction so that's pretty cool and then lo and behold look what shows up housing features
remember housing hit number 15 on the accessible housing but now we had three that came up
Roanoke is a good place to live and grow old if there's affordable housing options
for all income levels homes that are equipped with accessibility features
and low income housing that's safe and well maintained that that was significant
after that it was respect I feel respected by my neighbors again it's perception
and followed by you know my neighbors are willing to help me if they know that I
need help and I'm willing to help them again a perception piece now because the neighborhood
is such a good was so important to this you know the neighborhood is a good place to live and grow
old we said to ourselves well what makes the neighborhood a good place to live and grow old
okay so we had to run our analysis again all right and what do you think we found lo and
behold it was the same except transportation public transportation replaced housing
and in this case they picked all six variables came up as significant that it's affordable safe
reliable convenient you know I can trust it that makes sense in your neighborhood that's
where you want to get home to your house you need that public transportation that's close to home
so those are the predictive findings of what makes Roanoke a good place to live and grow old
which is useful then for the city to say you know what these may be the features that we need to
address now one last thing we found two different things that were very interesting in our analysis
and I wanted to share with you so it all looks black and white cut and dry here like this is
what we should we should address but when we looked at neighborhoods neighborhoods matter
number one they matter the neighborhood's a good place to live and grow all the city's a good place
however we could never connect neighborhood location with anything it wasn't a significant
factor in anything in our survey in other words neighborhood location did not predict whether or
not the city was a good place to live and grow old and we think how can that be you know in
all of our analysis neighborhood wasn't playing a role and those you familiar with new broad oak
know that typically we think of northwest Roanoke is where the poor people live southwest Roanoke is
where the rich people live okay I mean there's a there is a divide in that city race played no no
nothing either neighborhood didn't matter all right well what we think and there is
some literature to back this is that while people identified their home as in a city
neighborhood they actually conceptualized their neighborhood differently in a broader
fashion and it's very individualized so in other words I go to my church over here I go
to my part-time job over here my store is over here and i only go to the Kroger in southwest
so now if you link those all together here's your neighborhood which is kind of an odd
boundary but you know it's bigger than that city doesn't mean the neighborhood so what does this
tell us to remember to remember that if we are going to do any neighborhood interventions we need
to make sure that our definition of neighborhood aligns with what the intervention is so that we
actually target the right people in the right place the second thing to remember is income
income was the only resident characteristic variable that mattered in this whole survey
that came up age did not matter people that were 45 thought the same as our 90 year old people
okay age didn't matter race didn't matter and we over sampled African Americans because there was
a heavily marginalized group in one area we really overstayed didn't matter income matters low-income
residents rate the city lower as a good place to live and grow old than high-income residents
okay I can kind of see that you know you don't have the advantage you might not think it's
such a nice place it's not affordable but what we have to remember and this is why you always
ask a gerontologist to become part of your study team okay to help think up these things is that
older adults tend to live on fixed low incomes it doesn't matter that I have a house paid for
in southwest you know I still only get twenty thousand dollars a year income and I'm hurting I
can't do anything with that house which I'm sure in your classes you talk about houses that need
to be upgraded upkeep and you tend to just stable stay put so older residents tend to live on fixed
low incomes and live in all city neighborhoods so anyway income and neighborhood are two things that
I'd like you to remember as you move forward and address this topic
well I think we we met our goal of moving from the scale of the things we handle through the scale of
the house to the scale of the community so let's open the the floor for questions
or observations from the from our audience questions for a panelist
or questions among the panelists
so when you say income matters that doesn't talk about whether they live in like a forward
area right income we have a lot of people in our area here that their income is really seven eight
hundred dollars a month a thousand dollars a month they are very poor they are impoverished
and um they may have had a life where they were working and making a lot of money but
that's all that they they make and they may live in an area that's you know middle class
before you made the survey did you have any preconceptions about what
those who were being surveyed would consider to be a neighborhood
we thought that they would identify with the neighborhood because
the city of Roanoke has a neighborhood services coordinator there's a full-time physician
and they have a civic engagement officer that you know sends out news flashes to everybody there's
29 neighborhood organizations in Roanoke so we went into this thinking that oh we could find
a couple of neighborhoods that are really pleased with being age friendly and a couple that aren't
and then we can compare and contrast them so it really blew us out of the water that none of this
really mattered in fact we asked have you ever attended a neighborhood organization meeting you
know and all that none of that seemed to matter either so we were surprised so you based it off of
the existing structure of the neighborhoods rather than what they might consider their neighborhood
right we did ask a series of questions that we had to throw out because they were so off the
wall we asked people we gave them 14 destinations you know like which of the following are in your
neighborhood you know a police station your bank your church you know and uh just destinations
and when I was sitting knowing that you know these 12 people lived in this apartment building and
the responses that we got were so extremely varied and it was like you know this isn't
it's not going to produce good data so that's one way that people look at neighborhoods is asking
what's in your neighborhood where do you think it is do you think it might be
related to levels of mobility as well in the sense that we think about communities of people who have
high mobility and so they can spread their daily activities across a larger area in contrast with
perhaps people who are more limited right and we did ask people about um we didn't come right
out and said hey are you disabled you know we don't ask that well we did ask people do you
use radar which is the bus system that is used for people with disabilities we asked them if
they needed help with their personal care and we asked them if they had a chronic health condition
or you know limitations and really only gosh it was less than eight percent of our
sample actually had that we had a very healthy robust sample you know so we couldn't really
you know look at that but we do know that Roanoke is very car dependent about 80 percent of our
participants use their vehicle to get places only 10 rely on the bus so it's very car dependent so
they could be all over the place yeah I was going to say that mobility may not be always related to
physical disability but rather to income level if you can't afford the car and public transit isn't
accessible right or you know other reasons I think so we did and and then I'll shut up
so we did ask people what's your primary mode of transportation and gave them you know eight
choices and then we asked them if your primary mode of transportation wasn't available what
would you do and first of all you have 80 people saying I drive my car and then the second one if
your car isn't available what they put about 60 said I'd drive my other car okay so all right
yeah they weren't going Uber or nothing you know
I'm curious I think this maybe is maybe tailored to you a little bit more Ed I'm curious if
the the mode in which the research the user research is conducted sort of
as prototyping is happening is that different when you are addressing an aging population versus
looking at user testing for a different population how does the testing change
I'm not I don't exactly know how to answer that question except to say that that frankly
a lot of our testing is is a little bit fudgy in the in education it's not we don't
we we can't we can't pay people to participate therefore we can't bother them every three days
with what we're doing so so you'll see a lot of things where a lot of old people look like they're
20 years old yeah they are and then is there maybe an ethos that you're trying to convey that it's
different and even though it's fake it's like is there a different ethos and maybe you can
speak to this as well is there a different ethos and how you approach that kind of user testing
to sort of get the sensitivity level ready for well I don't I don't think so I mean what we're
we like to think that industrial design is an empathetic profession and that we
apply it everywhere and sometimes it seems more necessary or more obvious than other times but
but you know what we're one of the things we're trying to do is stop make crap stop making crap
and make things that really matter to people so we're really trying to
address that situation whenever if it's kids if it's you know i mean it's it's
a little harder with the um probably the age group of like 18 to 36 where where values tend to be
a little more flexible at that point again I don't know that that's you get you're smiling
at me you get my point but you know when you're dealing with with kids or the or the elderly I
mean it's a matter of just going in and trying to find something that really makes life better you
know and and and then like I said you know in in school we fake it a lot because we have to
but but when you go into the industry if that's if you're making you know oxo high chairs you're
testing them on kids as much as you possibly can to find out beyond whether or not they function
whether they're whether they're something a kid wants to use and feels good about and that kind
of stuff and the same thing with with aging but it but again you know i mean for for us it's
it tends to be someone once said to me a long time ago when I first came here industrial design is
more objective than architecture on both levels it's more about the physical and it's more about
the object you know we're trying to get people to understand our students to understand that
they need to really find out what mot what the emotional content is for people as well
I would just add to that though but I was really impressed by the first project that you mentioned
where the students targeted a very affective relationship with the older people with their pets
they they do that a lot emotional relationships there's never there interestingly enough this
is a plug for id students um there's never a shortage of wanting to tackle important issues
um we generally have to tone them down a little bit like I had a student who wanted to do a
senior thesis on solving human trafficking so I don't know if you can do that in 15 weeks
you know you might want to you might want to pick something a little easier
to work with but they always want to pick important projects it's never an
issue except for the guys who like to do shoes yeah that's different
other questions yes everything so since you're your group of people that you were surveying
were such healthy individuals do you think that data would have changed
if they weren't that's a very good question we talked about that quite a bit with the city
but the city wanted to know about active people you know because certainly when you start becoming
reliant on other people for your care and are more institutionalized are you really living within the
city or you having that institution take care of you so the city really required that and that when
you do contract work you do what the contractor would like you to do yeah but it it could
how many people in the city live in assisted living facilities not that many because actually
within the city of Roanoke and again the city of Roanoke's landlocked here you know we we talk
about Roanoke but really we're talking about the Roanoke valley most of the time the city is quite
small and there's under a hundred thousand people and I don't know if there's one assisted living if
that or maybe one nursing home most of them are in the valley around there it's pretty limited
questions yes
You were saying that on a neighborhood scale that particular electric transit just on a neighborhood
scale would be much more important to residents than at a city scale right is there something to
attribute that to i know more important to coming home is is there a comprehensive transit system
forward or is it more regionally based oh yeah now there's a career for you folks if you want to get
into transportation there's um it's very difficult to understand but i'll try to answer your question
there's a mothership of transportation that comes out of the city of Roanoke and they contract out
to all of the areas in Roanoke valley including the paratransit and other sub-transits the problem
is those are contracts that that connect up and what people find is well wait a minute
it only stops six blocks from my neighborhood and especially with paratransit it's not curb to curb
you know it's it's pretty much we'll leave you off at the Kroger and you can wheel yourself home
you know so I think that's probably why there Roanoke has a new transportation plan that is just
emerging and through our encouragement they're changing their board to include older adults
as well as people with disabilities you know to get more of that user face to it to try to figure
this out but transportation is grant funded you know it's not just taxes paying for it they rely
heavily on government grants for transportation systems and over the years so it's a huge issue
and that if you know anyone in transportation I'm sure there's a lot of work for you so we
continue to subsidize our highways but we cut back on our public transit oh yeah yeah yeah
even in my neighborhood and I live in a very nice neighborhood
down by the Gucci Kroger and but for me to get to the bus stop from my house is a little over a mile
downhill up a hill and down a hill which means on the way back it's up hill downhill and uphill
I drive yeah there you go yeah those issues become just much more pressing as people lose mobility
good question
in terms of aging is
um i'm not sure i unders i mean i understand the decreasing metal abilities i'm i'm actually
um very familiar with that but well i mean there's all kinds of prototyping and you you can paper
prototype things and just like how do you how do you write stuff out on post-it notes put it up
you know walk through a process there's all kinds of prototyping i guess i the the thing
we try to prototype everything we do we try to walk through a process on it and sometimes it's
physical um but the main thing i think that that's most important about it is that we're trying to
break the prototype in some way or another we might be trying to break it aesthetically
physically um cognitively whatever that process is we're trying to break it so we can find out
you know how to make it better it's it's part of that there's that old line fail fail early we're
trying to fail as fast as possible um so i guess i don't really quite answer your question but
but we we're trying to prototype everything every project that that students work on it
requires some kind of prototype are you asking about how do you prototype something physical or
cognitive discipline so he's not really asking about the process of prototyping but maybe
like some ideas of how you address issues
well i mean in in school we would probably fake it um in in the real product design world
you would find people with matching physical or mental capabilities
and get them to test the product you know um and there's a there's a there's one process
that that you ask someone to use the product and tell you what they're doing why they're making
the decisions they're making as they're going through it um and we just you know we do that
with each other and and that kind of thing but in in the professional world you you buy into it
you buy you buy the time i might just respond to that by tweaking it a little bit maybe tweaking
your question but thinking it at a different scale that we know that um not every person
who who ages is subject to dementia or other cognitive disabilities but many people are
and there's a really interesting group research group that's I think from Oxford University
that's actually developed some guidelines and written a book called Inclusive Streets
and the target group is people who are suffering from early stages of dementia who want to continue
to age in place stay in their neighborhoods feel secure so you know what are some ways that we can
work to either redesign or retroactively redesign rethink about how how legible our wayfinding
systems are how easy it is for people who may have some cognitive disability to navigate and don't
forget that if we make it easier for those people we're probably making it easier for everybody
else but i think that's a really interesting group that's working on that particular issue
at the scale of the neighborhood the problem the the problem for a lot of it is there's so much
infrastructure that already exists i mean what are you gonna do it plus it takes you know I think
it took eight years to get the street sign for our street changed because it was spelled wrong
yeah by that time it probably seemed right to you yeah it did why'd you change that
i think we're just about up to our allocated time are there any other questions that people
have okay well I'd like to thank our
panelists