Design against loneliness: service design toollkit for social connectivity among the elderly

Design against loneliness: service design toollkit for social connectivity among the elderly

Weng, Haoxin (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Sonneveld, Marieke (mentor)
Goossens, Richard (graduation committee)
Dong, Yumei (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

2019-08-23

Loneliness, as a social problem, has drawn wide attention of the academic and public. Moreover, loneliness among the elderly is significant. Up to 32% of adults older than age 55 report feeling lonely at any given time. Millions of euro have spent to identify the lonely elderly. With a great interest in social design, the author is intrigued by this issue and thus, initiated the project with an attempt to make a contribution to it with design methods.

In the research phase, extensive literature constructed a holistic view of the loneliness and yielded a new perspective of understanding it. Loneliness is like the destination of the vicious circle between negative social interaction and negative social cognition. Moreover, it may spread through negative interaction. Thereby, the project focuses on social interaction as the entry point for intervention. Through partnering with Vierstroom, one elderly home care company who is also interested in connecting their elderly members, the project finds a context for designer’s intervention. It is activities organized by the Vierstroom and Palet welfare such as bingo game, or care lecture. Investigation of the context revealed dozens of problems and opportunities. There are five pain points highlighted in the elderly activity: the reliance of facilitator, the passive social attitude, the negative social norm, the negative complaining and the one-way communication.

A new relationship between elderly and organization: sports fan and coach
Analysis and ideation provoke a vision that elderly and organization could be like sports fan and coach. With service design methods, the author paves the road to vision by seeing the activity as multiple-layers and sequential interaction. After that, a service strategy is synthesized with four steps for four sub-visions. Moreover, the strategy is translated into 15 design guidelines. Thereby, organizations could adopt the guidelines to enhance their service or generative service ideas in various cases.

Social design
Loneliness
service design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:079469e2-f334-4a72-8800-e19c4c01e29a

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Haoxin Weng