My home project was about working with intellectual disabled youngsters, who were about to move on their own in the near future. Our assignment was to research and design assists for them to make their independency start as painlessly as possible. Every team of two students got their own youngster as a contact to work with.
09.2014-10.2014 Helsinki
Empathy is most significant way to nderstand our users. We tried to get deep empathy with our client step by step. We visited different place that they live and study. We also share the insights through teams discussion by telling the stories of those youngsters.
A synthesized persona came out after several discussions. But we found more essential problems.
Based on research at first stage, we decided to focus on how to keep those youngsters in good routine and enhance their self-awareness .
During further research, we found the the gap between users and us.
We also found the wide gap between different stakeholders.
Instead of routines and self-awareness, we found it is essential to built up a tool for people who want to support these youngsters..
Instead of creating a service design concept only for those youngsters, we decided to work on a service system concept that could smooth the information flows between youngsters, parents, assistants and other service provider.
We want to make those real heroes who stand behind youngsters feel more supported by each other . We hope to reduce the pain in hand over and take over.
The concept includes 3 touch points. They will be utilized in different contexts and share the same database. Service providers will be the customers and they can share the information about the youngsters.
And all the information will contribute to the PASSPORT that support youngsters to express themselves and start a conversation with real themselves.
The Personal edition is smaller by size and data. There is information that new people need to know about the youngsters, it would tell about the person’s mentality, personality in addition to basic information.
And like a social media profile, youngsters can start a conversation with their hobbies, experience and milestons in their lifetime on this Passport.
The housing edition, which would have accurate and private information about the residents, from medical to psychological. Besides, it is a tools that assistants and parents can use to coperate with youngsters. It is physical, touchable and easy to update.
Because of privacy issue, it should be located in a safe place at housing only.
Databasewill record all the updating of the residents’ information. Check Schedule and routines. The platform is only open to who has access to know the private info.
Export different reports based on needs:
Updated PASSPORT, medical record, financial situation,
We designed several Interaction touch-points inside this small booklet. We call it Passport because we hope that users can hold it pass the barrier of communication.
“It is very useful. We really like this booklet. Communication is always a big problem for our children”
To help stakeholders and parents understand our concept, we used service blueprint to describe the experience journey of new staff coaching in future housing. Service blueprint is also a good tool to explain the complexity of our concept. Although the blueprint was not refined with decent details, we hoped our audiences understand our concept through the visualization.
The information transferring always make youngsters and staffs suffer a lot. And because the scenario in this diagram occurs a lot in such housing, so we chose it to illustrate how the solution would work.
This diagram illustrates the possible scenario that those youngster meet with new personal in their social activities, such as meet with new colleague or neighborhood in community event. Emotion trends will affect by touch-points.
The interactions happen around the Passport will make easier for youngsters to express.
This diagram illustrates the emotion trends that reflect how the teachers and parents feel during the youngster’s journey. It also includes possible emotion trends with the usage of our concept.
The interactions happen around the database will make easier for parents and teachers to share the understanding of youngsters.
We had our presentation in Jan. 2015 to parents committee and service company. Both of them like the concepts we generated. The parents also filled the evaluation form for us. We had 9 concepts from different perspectives, and we believe it was a good start point to develop those concepts further.
It was a long journey to understand our clients, the journey for them to be independent will be much more longer. I believe designers could do more in helping people with intellectual disability.
