MDES THESIS PROJECT
Emilia
Responsibilities
Design Research
User Testing
Prototyping
Design Execution
Overview
Emilia is a thesis project that investigates solutions to mitigate loneliness by supporting elders to connect with their families and friends trough more intimate and tangible interactions. Loneliness is caused by one’s desire of being closer and connected to someone when in reality they are isolated and away from their loved ones. This project studied solutions to support elders to experience this feeling of closeness and connectedness when they are remote and away from someone they care and love.
The Problem
For many elder adults aging can become very challenging. A great number of elders experience social isolation, causing them to suffer from depression and loneliness. Psychological health have been proved to be as important to the well being of Elders as their physical health. Keeping an active social relationships can bring great benefits to their quality of life. Loneliness surpass obesity as a factor to predict early death. The causes of loneliness can be a sudden change of environment, like moving from their own place to a care home, the lost of a partner or a friend, but often it can be related to the lack of contact with their families and friends. Sometimes their families are too busy and forget to contact them periodically. Worried about invading their family privacy or becoming a burden, elder adults tend to reduce the frequency by which they visit or call their loved ones. Often due to physical impairment they start avoiding activities outside their places, thus diminishing moments of socialization. Loneliness is a feeling, an emotion caused by people's desire of being close and connected when in reality they are isolated and away from their loved ones. The Emilia project studies solutions that can support elders to experience this feeling of connectedness when they are remote and away from someone they care and love, thus hopefully mitigating loneliness.
The Outcome
A big part of an intimate relationship is the context and intimate knowledge we cary about one another. On the exchanges of messages that happen between intimate individual, often the content has less importance then the act itself, those bits of interaction work more as a token of awareness, connection and intimacy between the parties. They can even be ambiguous to outsiders but they have great value to the ones involved. The outcome of this project is a pairs of connected objects that allow the elder to engage in a more tactile and intimate interaction with family and friends and support the feeling of connectedness. This objects were designed in the shape of small chocolate boxes that one could give as a gift to a significant other.
How It Works
The top of the box has a grid of six squares, each square have an individual sensor and 4 LEDs. Each box comes with 6 tiles, when one tiles is put over the grid the sensor detects it and that part is light up on both boxes. When both boxes have tiles in matching places the light pulses. A very simple and ambiguous interaction that aims two support the two elements of intimacy described above: Touch and and the intimate knowledge that both parties have of each other.
Prototype
