Technology Co-design in Context: A Walk and Talk with Gina Freeman
image by tessa j. brown
BY GINA FREEMAN & TESSA J. BROWN
Tessa: Snow has fallen overnight, five centimeters or so blanketing the ground as I head out to meet Gina on Prince’s Island Park. It’s 11am, later than we meant to meet–Gina’s been up since 6am for an early morning yoga class. But I only sleep every second night or so lately, and last night wasn’t my night, so I’ve been slow getting started. A cluster of geese fly overhead, wide-winged shadows against a mostly-grey sky, bright blue showing just at the horizon. Their calls echo through the chilly air as I pick my way through the narrow paths people have carved through the snowy sidewalk. As I cross the bridge to the park, I watch the little ice flows that have built up at the bend in the river. Rounded and translucent, their shape and motion remind me of lily pads.
Gina: I woke early this morning to wince and wobble my way through an online yoga class (camera and mic off to hide my shame, naturally). Early mornings are unusual for me as a habitual night owl, but I hoped this morning’s class would motivate me towards pre-noon action. Somehow, my post-yoga shower and breakfast take multiple hours, and so when I leave the house it is almost 11 am. The cold is refreshing (I remembered my layers), and the high winter clouds and fresh snow makes the world almost painfully bright. The river is mostly frozen and covered in snow, but in fits and starts, the water breaks to the surface, revealing a flash of turquoise and blue.
Tessa: We walk across the Island’s south side, past the River Café and across the Peace Bridge, and settle in at the Oolong Café to chat. Gina is sitting kitty corner to me–we’ve pulled two tables together and we sit on opposite sides at opposite corners so we can both have our laptops out. There’s a large window next to us, facing east.
I order chilli and a latte, Gina a sandwich and hot chocolate. I’m a little jealous of the hot chocolate. I question my choices. Then, I question Gina about what she’s working on.
Gina: I am a Doctoral Student in the Computational Media Design program at the University of Calgary, about halfway through my second year. I am preparing for my candidacy, when I’ll share my research proposal with a cadre of academic professionals who will ask me difficult questions about my aims, assumptions and approach.
Tessa: I am typing Gina’s responses as she talks, trying to catch the gist when I don’t catch her exact words. I ask her to explain her research area.
Gina: My research looks at co-design with older adults in assisted living communities. Co-design means including the people your design impacts in the design process. The aim of co-design is to create technologies that people are more likely to actually use in their day-to-day lives. In my mind, the worst approach for co-design is to just use it as essentially a validation process–you create the technology and then you get “users” to try it and tell you that it’s good. A lot of people refer to that as co-design, but I think it misses the point. You’re still asking that people shape themselves around the technology, rather than shaping technologies around people’s needs. Real co-design for me has to involve human beings on a deeper level, and respond to their real needs rather than trying to anticipate or guess at them. Co-design has become a buzzword among computer scientists, designers, and technology developers in general, but when you take a look at what’s actually happening, they’re rarely doing what I would consider ‘true’ co-design. They don’t see the communities they work with as true partners in their design, they see themselves as expert technology designers who extract information from these communities and then make their “best guess” as to what these communities need or want. It can be very centred on the designer’s experience. I knew of one group that was working to create a health tracker for older adults in an assisted living community–the app they actually designed ended up including a period tracker, even though everyone in the community was well past menopause. They claimed to be community-centred, but they weren’t even really talking to the people in the communities they were supposed to serve. They don’t take the people they work with seriously.
Tessa: Tell me more about the space you’re working in now?
Gina: Assisted living communities are places where older adults who can no longer safely live at home can live, socialize and receive care. They are an interesting mix of a private residence, a public meeting space with scheduled activities like exercise classes and shared mealtimes as well as a space in which simple medical care can be delivered (e.g. physician check-ups and care planning, toenail trims, and blood tests). Older adults living in these communities are semi-independent: they self-manage some aspects of their daily care needs such as taking medications and personal hygiene, while other aspects of their care are managed by collaborative networks of family members, volunteer organizations and professional caregivers. There is huge variety in the people who live in these communities, the kinds of care they need, and what their collaborative care network looks like, and that makes them a fascinating space for co-design. They’re highly complex spaces for health information sharing. This kind of complexity provides a wonderful opportunity for some really good co-design to happen.
Tessa: What makes assisted living communities so interesting for you as a space to design in and around
Gina: Assisted living communities aren’t just the design of their physical space, their geographic location, the demographics of the people who live there, or their organizational structure. They include the historical, philosophical and cultural ideas that inform their design, location, demographics and organization. Assisted living communities are very much informed by the place older adults hold in our society, and concepts like collaborative care and person-centred care. Collaborative care is an interdisciplinary approach to care that in this case includes older adults, their families, professional caregivers and sometimes volunteer organizations. Person-centred care takes into account the ‘whole person’ - their needs, their likes, their dislikes, the little quirks and contradictions that make them who they are as a person. It understands the care-network as an extension of the person at its centre.
I’m interested in how these concepts, like collaborative care, person-centred care and so on, are expressed in or maybe through assisted living communities.
I want to understand assisted living communities beyond their statistics and structures. I want to understand how they express our values of collaborative care or person-centred care. I want to understand why we created these communities - what were our goals, what was our driving philosophy? To me, the concepts of collaborative care and person-centred care are really important. It’s possible to summarize these concepts really briefly as I’ve tried to do here, but what I’m really interested in is how are these philosophies of care expressed through both your delivery of care and the technologies you design for these spaces?
A technology that is developed with the underlying value of person-centred care is very different from a technology that is designed around the value of organizational efficiency. It's important to think about these things not just on an intellectual level but to wrestle with them and engage with them on a more fundamental level. How do we express our beliefs through the technologies we design? All these philosophies, they’re the context we’re working in.
Tessa: Outside the window where we sit, clouds roll in, turning the sky a uniform hazy grey. It’s supposed to snow again later, and we realize our chance for another walk is fading quickly. We pack up our computers and head out, walking back across Prince’s Island Park, towards the East Village this time. We part ways at the Lion’s Bridge–Gina continues east while I head back to the north west. By the time I get home, the snow has begun to fall.
Georgina (Gina) Freeman is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Computational Media Design program at the University of Calgary. She studies health technology co-design with older adults residing in assistive living communities and is interested in creative, collaborative approaches to problem-solving and design. Her academic background is in biomedical ethics and health systems research. Her life passions include gardening, cycling, going for strolls and appreciating art and design. She is an enthusiastic amateur who loves to explore and collaborate in many different forms of performance and art. For contact and additional information, check out her website at ginafreeman.com.
Tessa J. Brown is a Researcher in the Environmental Media Lab and one of Heliotrope’s co-editors. She is also a PhD student in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary.
