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ESSENTIALLY INCLUSIVE AND VERSATILE BATH CARE Product design for women over 70: Ageist designs in bath care products
No full textDignity in matters of personal hygiene, bath and shower care must be afforded to all age groups. Specifically, older individuals, who live alone. For my topic's inspiration, I modelled the target demographic after my mom and coupled by the fact she has had carpal tunnel surgeries during the pandemic. What surfaced to light was the ageist product and packaging architecture that may restrict her from showering and bathing, and therefore, preventing her from living independently in this aspect of normal daily life. There is now an added emphasis on self-isolation brought about by the pandemic, which led me to wonder how older women in a similar situation and lifestyle as my mother practised self-care from the viewpoint of product design.
My project seeks to understand the often-overlooked designs in everyday bath care products that could be ageist and unintentionally exclusionary. By honing in on the target audience of women over 70 years of age, I can catch a glimpse of what might truly be an unnecessary hurdle in the lives of senior women facing ageist product designs lurking in their shower care, by concentrating specifically on the opening mechanisms of bath and body care bottles.
Study findings via semi-structured, qualitative interviews helped shed light on the lived experience of the older demographic and their journey in using products and bottles with limited consideration to their abilities that come with age. Based on my own research and experience as an aromatherapist, I was able to design a product for bath care, keeping usability and delight for my audience in mind.
Findings can be used to launch further research when it comes to product design to limit ageist designs in other fields as well
Guidelines for Designing Inclusive User Interfaces For People with Visual Impairments
Get PDFThere are a lot of people around the world who have access to a good smartphone but cannot make full use of it because they have some form of disability. These days a good mobile is not a privilege but rather a necessity and being able to use it entirely can unlock doors we’ve never imagined. People with visual impairment often find it difficult to interact with various user interfaces.
The objective of this research was to learn how visually impaired individuals interact with smartphone interfaces and understand the barriers they face in order to come up with guidelines for designing inclusive user interfaces. A series of interviews with four visually impaired adults provided insights to understand the barriers faced on a daily basis when it comes to interacting with smartphone interfaces. Their inputs resulted in 1) newly designed guidelines that address the gaps in the current design system and 2) a wireframe design for a smartphone app that shows the implemented guidelines. The scope of this research study is to design guidelines for making smartphone interfaces and apps accessed through smartphones accessible for users with visual impairments
Resilient Recovery: A systems analysis of disaster recovery in Canada
Get PDFThe frequency and severity of disasters caused by natural hazards and extreme weather is increasing across Canada. Each year, more communities face devastation, disruption, and the difficult task of rebuilding. However, the process by which communities pick up the pieces – disaster recovery – is currently failing to deliver more resilient communities. In Canada, disaster recovery prioritizes the rapid return to pre-disaster conditions without consideration for the changing risk environment and the ways in which recovery can enable communities to better prepare for the future.
Our commitment to this failing system has long-term consequences. With the cost of disasters dramatically increasing, how we rebuild communities contributes to their vulnerability or resilience in the future. Because of the static nature of physical structures, with building and infrastructure lifespans of more than fifty years, recovery locks in the risk profile of a community’s built environment for generations.
This project examines the barriers and opportunities for municipalities, the level of government closest to the individuals and businesses devastated by disaster, to integrate systematic disaster risk reduction into recovery and thereby rebuild more resilient communities. Using systems thinking informed by foresight and human-centered design research methods, this study aims to identify the constraints and leverage points for changing our approach to recovery in Canada so it prioritizes resilience to future risks instead of recreating the past.
Resilient Recovery: A systems analysis begins by describing disaster trends in Canada and the factors increasing disaster risk, then traces of evolution of the disaster recovery system and analyzes the dynamics at play in the current system. It explores emerging forces of change and the implications these emergent issues may have for recovery, then concludes with an analysis of the system’s leverage points, considerations for how foresight could enhance the process, and a proposed pathway towards transformational change
Beyond Despair, How Nihilism Can Motivate Us For Radical Systems Change
Get PDFNihilism is perhaps most popularly understood as a belief in nothing, and that life is meaningless. But of course, it is more nuanced than this.
Nihilism is not a belief that life is meaningless. It is discovering that the life you are living within the current cultural conditions does not feel meaningful to you. As a result, you go on living your life in ways that either try to evade reality or change it (Gertz, 2019). For years, I have noticed increasingly nihilistic sentiments online; nihilists dismissing activists for their ongoing attempts to organise, and even popular meme accounts based on nihilistic content; like “@cheerful_nihilism” which has almost 200k followers on Instagram as of writing this.
The goal of this research is to explore the prevalence and sources of nihilism today. I then want to look at how it relates to myself and other aspiring change-makers, as well as how we may channel our feelings of nihilism for radical systems change.
There are many interpretations of nihilism, so this research will begin by looking at how white western philosophers discussed concepts of nihilism, and then contextualising those ideas for considerations of privilege. I then go on to make a systems analysis of daily life under Western colonial capitalism, and argue that nihilism is a product of this system. In an attempt to determine if nihilism is becoming more prevalent, a netnographic scan will show some of the ways nihilism is rising in mainstream discourse online.
This paper goes on to synthesise the research, and discuss how it is relevant to aspiring changemakers. Since the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCAD University is a microcosm of changemakers, I survey and interview my peers to see if there are shared feelings of nihilism amongst them.
To conclude, I look at how nihilism can inspire us to create radical systems change; with perspectives from non-white, Queer, Indigenous, Disabled, and revolutionary activists. In undoing aspects of colonial capitalism ingrained in us, such as toxic individualism, the commodification of everything, and the belief that capitalism is the only way - we may begin to create a world we can live more meaningfully in
The Collapsed Space
Get PDF‘The Collapsed Space’ is an open-ended and multidisciplinary research-creation piece exploring the complexities of diasporic identity through investigating my own personal lived experiences of being a Chinese Canadian American. Through virtual reality (VR) development as research-creation, this arts-based research uses auto-ethnographic practices to document generational narratives and personal memories into a VR experience, primarily through a process known as deep mapping used from the digital humanities. This thesis engages with the diasporic identity using methods including digital storytelling, deep mapping, expanding upon 2D images into 3D and 4D, and documenting responses and reflections on the research creation process through self-reflexive blog posts including feedback from my family members. Using the immersive power of virtual reality, this thesis seeks to also explore the ways in which the embodied experience can be used as a form of digital storytelling
Inclusive Development of Online Support Community Specialized for Chinese Youth's Mental Well-being
Get PDFThe growth in the volume of social media users is a global trend. Chinese social media users are also in line with this trend as a country with a vast population. The functions of social media platforms are no longer limited to meeting people's daily communication. As more diverse functions are presented on social media, there are concerns about their negative impact, such as media bias, online violence, and the conflict between censorship and freedom of speech. In China, where youth are the primary target users of social media, it is necessary to improve the inclusiveness of Chinese social media platforms for the youth group and reduce the negative impact of social media on Chinese youth. This research will explore the characteristics of an online support community specialized for Chinese youth and develop a prototype of supportive online platforms that meet their needs.
Keywords: social media, media bias, online violence, conflict between censorship and freedom of speech, Chinese youth, inclusiveness, online support communit
Playing within Systems for Change (The Art Panel)
Get PDFThis panel introduces research that challenges, exposes and critiques dominant socio, political and economic systems through playful processes. As the dominant representational traditions of the global north continue to frame people, environments and cultures, this panel offers a timely opportunity to reveal acts of artistic research that ‘upend’ the imaginary of a common socio/technical system, and recast it through practice research
Absence, Ignorance, Presence (AIP) – An Exformative Approach to Confronting Legacies of Oppression in Education
Get PDFLike when laying bare the root subsystem of a very old tree, for systems to be able to confront legacies of oppression in education, we must develop a grammar, a syntax and the appropriate semantics that permit the object matter of “confrontation” to be brought to the surface. To confront, in other words, is an activity of exhumation – and a confrontation is when we stand face to face (con + frons) with matter that was hitherto covered beyond a knowledge horizon separating the worlds of the knowable from the realms of the unknown. This workshop is an act of exformation – a concept that was first described as “information withheld,” (Nørretranders, 1998), later as “a communication method making things unknown” (Hara, 2015), and finally as “a process of learning by incrementally separating the knowable from the unknown” (Laleman, 2020). The workshop process aims at extracting the oppressive character of education from the unknown by creating an exformative space in which the activity of con+frons is embedded into the space by facilitated affordances.
Like the seed of a tree has a relatively simple design that ultimately leads to possibly life-changing tree-dependent experiences, so do facilitated affordances require minimum design for maximum outcome. Through the process of exploring these facilitated affordances, quite counter-intuitively, the legacy of “oppression” in education is not just recognized in the space of dominance and subservience (both aspects of the “presence” of education) – but in different guises of “absence” or “assumed redundancy” of education too. AIP is a workshop on systemic discovery in space. Facilitation is gentle, almost oblique, and restricted to ad-hoc translation of group-emergent features into affordances. Participants explore and learn cooperatively – with, from and among each other. They work with objects and grids as temporary placeholders of ideas – and build mental models that provide for experiential revelation of facets of oppression in the realms of skills and knowledge “management.
Wordings and Worldings—DALL-E wordplays to visualise alternative metaphors for complex systems
Get PDFWorld-ing, the act of imagining, shaping and visualising many worlds, is inextricably connected to the designer’s ability to work with words and language. The workshop builds on our previous RSD papers on languaging futures and the role of metaphors in exploring complex systems and presents a playful experiment using artificial intelligence programmes such as DALL-E and Midjourney. By using specific descriptive language, the participants will explore the relationship between words and visual representations and how alternative metaphorical visualisations could be used as prompts for imagining multiple and pluriversal futures within design