Facilitating and Measuring Older People’s Creative Engagement in a User Centred Design Process

The goal of my PhD is to research the relationship between creativity and age in the user centred design (UCD) process for user interfaces. To assess this, a comparative study will be conducted. First a UCD process with group of older people - future consumers (mainly 60+) will be run. Then the results from this group will be compared with sessions I will run with Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design students. Finally the same study will be conducted with mixed generation groups. The participants will be involved in two stages of the UCD process: in a contextual enquiry stage and in a prototyping stage. Throughout the process creativity, motivation and methodology adoption will be measured and compared across groups. As a result of this study new (or adapted) methodologies for encouraging creative participation of older people in the UCD process will be developed. This will be a valuable contribution to the HCI design field, as it will provide guidance on how to more effectively involve older people in the UCD process.