Designing tangible social media solutions for older adults

Purpose: Older adults may have trouble to stay socially connected because of technology barriers and ageing limitations. By combining subtle persuasive mechanisms with playful components to existing daily practices, the research aims at creating opportunities for older adults to adopt social media to engage in social activities with their peers. The research question is how the use of playful experience mechanisms, such as fellowship, discovery/exploration/curiosity and expression/creativity create values, such as reciprocity and similarities, privacy and self-expression, and the need for a common frame for interaction1 (Lehtinen et al., 2009), for elderly people in their friendships and social networks. Method: A design-research approach was followed to answer the research questions2 (Zimmerman et al., 2007). In such an approach, research is performed through design: iterations of prototypes are evaluated in context, leading to rich, qualitative and situational insights. Design artefacts are created to examine how theory can be translated into design considerations. Results & Discussion: Two design cases were conducted to examine how the three playful principles mentioned before support older adults to engage with their social networks. These prototypes were built based on the assumption that designs would fit better to the values of the older adults if the tangible social media solutions would support quality rather than quantity of contacts. Based on discussion and evaluation with a total of 25 users, involved at different stages of the project, it was concluded that the three playful principles can contribute to differ-ent values that older adults appreciate in their friendships and social networks. Table 1 dis-plays how these playful principles relate to different values for older adults within these two design cases. The results show practical examples of how designers can create relationships between playful principles and values in the context of the ageing population. Table 1: Mapping of three playful experiences to values of older adults related to friend-ship and social networks, through design elements that were incorporated in two design cases (DC1 = design case 1, DC2 = design case 2).