Super Dots: making social media tangible for senior citizens

  • Authors:
  • Maria Foverskov;Thomas Binder

  • Affiliations:
  • The Danish Design School, Copenhagen K;Rhe Danish Design School, Copenhagen K

  • Venue:
  • DPPI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Social media offers many possibilities for new ways of networking. Senior citizens are not the most common users of social media today, but they are nevertheless citizens that have a need for entering new social connections, networks and communities. In a recent project we looked closer at how to make use of co-design and prototyping in relation to service design for social networking among senior citizens. The municipality we work with has recognized the potentials of involving and engaging citizens in service design and co-creation but they lack experience on how to establish productive dialogues. A major issue is how to make the dialogue concrete and tangible for all participants involved. In this article we will discus an example of how to make new possibilities of networking through social media tangible through the design concept of Super Dots. Super Dots is not a classical prototype, but a delicately crafted set of props aimed at facilitating dialogue on community building among senior citizens at a co-design workshop. We will open the paper by discussing the relevance of new service concepts and infrastructures facilitating self-organized community building among seniors. Then we will introduce the particular way we have worked with co-design methodologies particularly the design concept Super Dots in service design, in the project Senior:Interaction. We present examples of the dialogues performed around Super Dots and based on these examples we end the paper by unfolding some of the benefits of working with tangible scaffolding materials as props in service design involving social media.