Older people as equal partners in creative design

Active older people want to be actively engaged by contributing their experiences to design better services and products. This paper demonstrates the importance of older peoples engagement in the creative design process in a small study where older people were engaged together with designers in the design of digital devices. Three creative workshops were conducted: the first with designers, the second with designers and older people, and the third with older people only. During the illumination stage of the creative process flexibility and flow were measured with topics and turns. Results show that when older people were working with designers more topics and a higher total number of turns were developed than by older people or designers working on their own, which indicates that they had the highest flexibility of ideas and possibly also the greatest flow

A Board-Game for Co-Designing Smart Nature Environments in Workshops with Children

In recent years, the Human Computer Interaction community has increasingly engaged children in the design process of technology for them as co-designers, and recently as protagonists in co-design. It has also recognised the need of “bringing children back to nature”. This paper combines both lines of research, giving children the role of protagonist co-designers of smart nature ecosystems. In order to engage children as co-designers, the research reported in this paper has employed a playful solution: a board game for children for co-designing smart interactive objects for outdoors nature ecosystems. This paper illustrates the genesis and recent evolution of the board-game in two workshops with children of different ages and gender. Its conclusions draw lessons for involving children as protagonist co-designers of smart nature ecosystems

User satisfaction with organizational learning time-efficiency in Topaasia Cards

This paper discusses the ways in which design games are used as scaffolds for knowledge creation. Using players’ reports on time-efficiency in deployments of Topaasia Cards, it demonstrates that play appears to foster creative dialogue and meaningful interaction that lead to user experiences of positive organizational knowledge creation.Peer reviewe