Designs that keep the users in mind

SPECIAL PLACE: Designed by RISD students, RS is a fashion accessory for a walker that provides storage. / PHOTOS COURTESY NATE DANA
SPECIAL PLACE: Designed by RISD students, RS is a fashion accessory for a walker that provides storage. / PHOTOS COURTESY NATE DANA

Designers who are developing new products need to have an audience that can offer criticism and feedback.

For a class of graduate students at Rhode Island School of Design, that audience came at Laurelmead, a retirement community where residents became the inspiration for design.

The collaboration between the university and the Providence retirement cooperative involved students working with residents in twos and threes, to find out more about their lives and design a product that could be useful.

For many of the students, who are first-year graduate students in industrial design, it was a first experience in working with older adults, said Claudia Rebola, RISD associate professor of industrial design. The 10-student class was focused on an area of design called “responsible design,” in which they create products that respond to the needs of people or the environment.

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The class instructors, including Rebola and lecturer Tim Maly, designed a curriculum and presented it to the Laurelmead board, which agreed to participate. Twenty residents volunteered to take part. They were paired with students, and the initial meetings consisted of interviews, or surveys, in which the RISD designers asked them about their habits or needs.

The students then developed a product they thought would respond to those needs. In presentations, the students received feedback from the Laurelmead partners.

“They needed to come up with something that responds to an actual need,” Rebola said.

For Rebola, who previously worked with older populations as a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the more memorable products was Skill Circle, a community system for empowering people to share knowledge related to tech devices

It was a series of training manuals, which could be used by Laurelmead residents who are comfortable using technology, to teach their fellow residents, one on one, how to use an iPad or other tech device.

“It was very interesting because the product itself was a self-managed training system to teach someone,” she said.

Another product she found appealing was Button Up!, which helps an older adult button a dress shirt. “They made it look like a piece of jewelry, something you would want to take and hold.”

Similarly, Spring Up, which was a day planner with a hard backing, served a dual purpose. The students who designed it noticed that their design partners were having trouble getting up out of soft chair cushions.

The Spring Up planner can be set on a seat cushion, and then used by the older adult as leverage to propel themselves out of the chair. All this, without looking like a medical device.

For the students, the class provided lessons in thinking beyond design. The partnerships allowed students to see the residents as people, not as older adults.

“They found out they were lively, interesting,” she said. “Designing for them wasn’t different than designing for anyone else.”

Yuzin Han, one of two students who created Skill Circle, said the concept was to tap into the existing resources within the building, to help residents who were having difficulties adapting to technology. The idea was sparked by a resident who said she had learned the most through one-on-one instruction.

The students designed a series of small booklets, with step-by-step instructions to help guide someone through the basics, including how to know when an iPad is connected to the Web. “It will actually be a great community-building tool,” Han said.

For the Laurelmead residents, the RISD partnership offered a sometimes mystifying brush with the design process.

Barbara Ruttenberg, a retired special education teacher, said she loved the idea of the partnership. “The idea of having young people, and their energy and their youthful outlook, it is so important,” she said. And she plans to sign up for it again, when another class returns in the fall semester.

But she wasn’t really sure about what came back in her first experience. Her students produced an item that was designed to be a health-related, personal record-keeper.

“We had no idea where they were going with this,” Ruttenberg said. “We had no idea what they were trying to do.”

Industrial designers need to understand they are creating products for someone in particular, said Maly, the RISD instructor. And the co-designers, he said, may not have understood the less-than-straight-line process that can lead to ideas.

The products weren’t designed with commercial applications in mind, but Skill Circle, at least, will live on at Laurelmead.

The administration is now inviting residents who need assistance to sign up for one-on-one tutorials, with the resident-teachers using the RISD booklets.

“We’re going to call ourselves the Grey Geeks or something,” said resident Hazel Hollmann. •

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