Meeteetse

This project was a group effort by Kynthia Brunette, Matthew Eisenstadt, Will Ryan and myself, advised by Martin Siegel. Some of the text on this page is taken from our submission paper.

Goals

The CHI 2005 Student Design Competition asked students to "design for artificial companionship to support the social well-being of seniors". We engaged in an open-ended design process aimed at creating a design that was grounded in both hci theory and reality, with heavy participation from senior citizens in the Bloomington, IN community.

Process

Contextual Inquiry

Our interviews and focus groups with seniors in community living centers near the university gave us a strong understanding of our user group. As expected, we met seniors who wanted to see more of their children and had a desire to use new technologies like email and the world wide web, but who lacked the digital intuition needed to complete these tasks. What surprised us was how socially well connected these individuals were, and what a strong support network the communal living situation provided. This would become a significant inspiration for our design.

Literature Review

We also conducted a literature review into psychological theories of depression and sadness and whether previous artificial companions had a positive effect on these problems. This research, described in detail here, highlighted that aloneness does not necessarily constitute lonliness, which suggested that we could target lonliness with an artificial companion. However, the seniors in our focus groups felt that while artificial companions like the Sony AIBO dog may provide some amount of companionship, these devices also highlight the lack of human companionship, which can make the artificial kind feel fake.

Concept Exploration

In order to try to find a creative solution that took these lessons into account, we tried to identify as many different types of artificial companions as possible—plants, animals, memories, places, characters, etc. Within these categories, we generated several promising ideas, including:

• A device that would give a voice to potted plants, allowing the plants to ask for water and converse with seniors, adding to the overall presence of life in the home.
• A location-aware digital camera with a projector or pair of glasses that could superimpose old photographs on the locations in which they were originally taken, allowing seniors to revisit those places and connect with their past.
• A set of wireless, context-aware devices that would be spread throughout the home to monitor its state, helping maintain seniors’ companionship with their home, pets, and plants while offering practical daily assistance.
• Modifications to a place (city, town, community center, etc) to make it easier for seniors to form a relationship with it. This would provide a “friend” which was always there, and would help seniors feel more comfortable going out and being social

These ideas were then presented to seniors who were questioned about how the designs would fit in their lives. After taking this feedback into account, we chose to focus on the last form of companionship: companionship with a place.

Our iterative design process then began in earnest. Additional literature review revealed much about the psychology of "place attachment" which we used to guide our design process. We designed a variety of devices that would increase seniors exposure to a central place in their community, help them insert themselves into the identity of the place, and make it easier for them to get involved in the community.

Design Research

We wanted to empirically test two of our core design assumptions. The first assumption was that exposure to images of a place would help people build attachment to the place. To test this, we gave several seniors carboard picture frames with a series of photographs taped to it. We asked the seniors to tear off a photograph each day for a week. We then interviewed them afterward to see if the photos had an effect. The results were subjective at best, but one participant reported that several days after the experiment began, when his spouse asked if he would like to go to an event, he said he “felt inclined to agree, whereas he might not have.” We considered this sufficient justification to continue with our design.

Prototyping

Figure: Animation and color coding on the schedule keeps users oriented.

We built a series of interactive prototypes, including a touch-screen event calendar and an easy to use digital camera to help seniors capture images of the place they were building a relationship with.

Evaluation

We had seniors perform a variety of tasks with these prototypes and then used the results of these experiments to refine those designs.

Final Design

A detailed description of our final design can be found here

Competition Results

We were finalists in the CHI 2005 Student Design Competition and competed in Portland, OR.

Publications

Brunette, K., Eisenstadt, M., Pukinskis, E., and Ryan, W. 2005. Meeteetse: social well-being through place attachment. In CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Portland, OR, USA, April 02 - 07, 2005). CHI '05. ACM Press, New York, NY, 2065-2069. PDF

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