Project Action for Age 2: Design process in service design

• Autor(a) principal: Franqueira, Teresa
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Gomes, Gonçalo, Costa, Rui Carlos
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/13449
• topic: Service Design; Social innovations; Ageing and intergenerational relationships; Participatory design; Design de serviços; Inovações sociais; Envelhecimento e relações intergeracionais

This paper aims to show the design process of a project developed by the Design students of the Universidade de Aveiro. The project is part of a wide challenge launched to all Portuguese Design Universities called “Action for Age”. This initiative intends to raise awareness amongst young designers to the problematic of population ageing and its consequent social transformations. It is intended to showcase new approaches to the design process, focusing in Service De- sign, contributing towards the consolidation of an emerging field in the Design area. The students were asked to identify a place and design a solution that would stimulate intergenerational relationships. Students were prompted to define their own brief, which led them to develop flexible solutions: a service, a network, an object, a shop, an initiative. The purpose was to conceive an integrated solution that could respond to the identified need of enhancing intergenerational relationships, resulting in better integration of the elderly, as well as other individuals, in the community. For the project kick off, students had to pinpoint a place and its ongoing activities. Those activities were regarded as social innovations, and as their goal was to analyse them thoroughly and propose ways to strengthen and connect them. On a second phase, students were engaged in scenarios’ building, which worked as a tool to facilitate strategic discussion amongst the different stakeholders involved, and later designed the toolkits that would enable the implementation of those scenarios. The results of these projects will be presented, although the focus of this paper is more the process and tools used for their development.