We (Nick, Leland and Jeena) as a team of students of the CMU Introduction to Physical Computing class are required to make an assistive device for an older person. We are assigned to work with James. On October 21th, 2 of our team members Nick and Jeena conducted an interview with James at his house to learn more about him.

Interview agenda

Prior to our interview, we prepared an agenda about the general flow we wanted to have for our interview as well as the types of questions we thought should be answered before we began thinking about project ideas for James. This was our agenda:

Icebreakers/Introductions:

–James’ Career and background, his interests

-Each of our majors and backgrounds, some things we like to do for fun or classes we are currently taking at CMU

Logistical Questions:

-Preferred methods of communication

–Best times to email James

-General expectations about how often he’d like us to update him

Questions about his daily life:

-Describe a typical day

-Some of his major hobbies

-Locations or activity he visits or performs often

-General nuisances he experiences

-The most annoying thing he’s had to do in the past couple of days

-New things he’s been trying out

-Things he does for fun with other people and who are those people?

-Things he liked to do but no longer does

Questions about James

-Some words to described himself

-His motivations for becoming an Osher student

-His hopes for the project

Interview summary and major takeaways

We arrived at our meeting with few expectations. James was waiting for us outside ready to receive us and right off the bat, he seemed to have some ideas about what kinds of things he thought would be good projects for us to tackle around the house. Before we got down to business, however, we talked for a while about his career at CMU and he in turn asked us about our interests and hobbies. At one point, the conversation turned to James and his wife’s love of frogs as we had noticed earlier a large number of amphibian statues scattered around the porch. He described to us how he had built the porch himself and would often sit outside and read.

As we went on, we learned more about James’ area of research as a physics professor and his frequent Skype calls with scientists at the CERN particle accelerator as well as his attempts to learn piano, German, and French simultaneously. One theme that seemed to come up repeatedly was James’ love for tinkering and working with his hands. He was very familiar with technology of all kinds and was planning on buying a drone later in the year.

Finally, James described to us the two problems that had come to mind as potential project ideas. He led us upstairs and showed us the first one.

James often has to straddle this staircase and lean over the fan to open his window.

Several times a year, James has a open a close a precariously positioned window behind a fan he would use for climate control. To open it, he would have to straddle a very high staircase and lift the heavy window himself (something he continues to do now).

His other major concern was a light switch that was blocked by a dresser. The only access he had to it was through a small hole cut out of the inside of the bureau which was rather awkward to reach when turning off the lights. He had thought there might be a way to create a new remote switch that was easier to reach.

This is the hole cut into the side of his bureau. On the other side is a light switch sandwiched between the furniture and the wall.

As we left, we spent some time playing music on the piano and talking to him about his process of learning. He said he loves Baroque, but struggled with learning how to play separate parts of a piece with separate hands.

In general, the interview felt like it went quite well. It was nice to arrive and find that James already had some ideas in mind, however, we were a little worried as we left that nothing had immediately stuck out as a project idea. Though James suggested some himself, with elaborating on the ideas ourselves, the projects initially struck us as too mechanically challenging or tending towards the trivial side.

What we learned about James, however, was invaluable. He’s a maker as well and is excited about being involved in the project. I’m sure if he could have enrolled in 223 himself, he would have and he had no shortage of ideas for his own projects in the future. So we felt like we left with an solid understanding of our customer, we were just missing the perfect project.

Post-interview wrap-up discussion

The meeting followed the agenda as James answered all the questions on the agenda. However, it was hard to come up with some definite possibilities for what to build a device for due to some miscommunication. James signed up to be an Osher student because he thought that he’d be building something, so he had a few ideas in mind . However, these ideas were quite mechanical problems that wouldn’t suit good problems for us to solve electronically.  If we were to do it again, we would make sure to be upfront with what kind of problems we’re looking for.  For example, when he is talking about a daily process of his, we should be suggestive in what-ifs to give him a better picture of what we’re looking for. I believe each member of the team felt the same way about the interview, as we all had trouble finding some good ideas of what to make for James.

This project is about designing an assistive device for an older person. As part of the product design process, we met with our client, Enid, to learn more about her life, daily needs, habits, and routines. The interview was held at Enid’s home, where she and her husband Errol kindly offered us a tour of their house and of their daily life. Our purpose was to extract information about Enid’s life to come up with a design scenario that would render her daily activities easier and more pleasant.

General Agenda

• Introductions
• Overview of our task as a team
  • Goals: Demo our own project 2
  • Timeline: Prototype crit and final deadlines
  • Questions?
• Interview
  • Probably start with daily routine, (or interesting points she brings up when we introduce ourselves)
  • Poll questions from below based on how the conversation is going, probably don’t just go in order
• Conclusions

How we improvised based on our initial agenda:

Questionnaire:

Before the meeting, a necessary thing was to compose a questionnaire. Then, we could start a conversation with Enid guided by the questionnaire itself. Our questions covered a wide range of aspects, concerning either matters of practicality, such as 1) “Are you experiencing any health condition or  sensori-motor disability?”, 2) “Is there anything that you would like to change or do differently in your daily routine?”, or touching the field of imagination, such as 1) “Do you have a favourite superhero?”, 2) “If you could possess a non-human property, what would that be?”.

Body and mind language:

While talking with Enid, we tried to extract meaning from her words, behavior and gestures, rendering visible to each other any potential preference, affinity, dislike she had developed about her daily activities. For instance, observing the vocabulary she used to express herself, we pointed out her love for reading. We followed this strategy in order to focus on particular activities each time and “dig” deeper. 

House tour:

We also asked for a short house tour. During that we confirmed Enid’s affinity for books (big libraries around the place) and plants, and also observed details not mentioned before (traveling – various destination books).

Many of her plants are situated like so in the living room, but there are more around the house

A look at a small portion of the total books in Enid’s house

Activity performance:

Finally, in the questionnaire’s section “Daily routine”, we were asking our older friend to perform her daily activities. Even though we didn’t have the opportunity to do that in our first meeting, we focused on one particular activity and asked her to perform a video for us a few days later. 

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways: 

While we had some amazing discussions and learned a lot about Enid’s and her husband’s life, we were not able to identify many ideas that we could do for this project. We quickly came to the conclusion that Enid doesn’t have issues that she would like to see solved by us, so the challenge became coming up with something that could enhance her life and still be practical. In the meeting itself,  we came up with one potential project idea. Enid has a lot of plants around the house, a couple are in a central location and others are scattered around the house. She said that it could be helpful to have a reminder system or something that could automatically water all the plants. We pondered this idea with Enid for a while, and tried coming up with ways that we could implement this wirelessly, since there were many plants around the house. We weren’t entirely sold on creating this for Enid, so we decided that we would send her the full list of questions that we didn’t get to in order to see if that may glean any other potential projects.

Concluding Thoughts After Meeting

Though we went off script early on during the interview, we did become acquainted with Enid and Errol through a more casual exchange. We learned a lot about their day-to-day life, but we could have driven the conversation more towards needs and issues where we could step in. Our team did not have the time to debrief immediately after the visit, but we sent our original list of questions via email for her consideration. We were pleasantly surprised to find Enid reply with an answer to all of the questions. We met after receiving these responses, and brainstormed other ideas for the assistive device.

From the visit and her email response, we gathered that Enid and Errol enjoy reading books and going to the movies. We considered building a movie/book recommendation system that is integrated into their home/furniture, but we decided to explore options that were able to leverage the “physical” aspect of physical computing.

Enid also mentioned that one of the tasks she finds monotonous is cleaning up after a meal daily. She also mentioned enjoying doing puzzles at breakfast, which led us to ask ourselves, “can we turn this activity into a sort of game?” We began exploring ways to make this obligatory task more entertaining, perhaps by integrating a game or puzzle into the activity.

On October 22nd, from 9:00a-10:00a, we met Jan in her home to discuss day to day problems that we could help alleviate through the construction of a physical computing device. We learned that Jan often wants to remain physically active, but forgets to take the time to exercise. Because of that, our proposed assistive device by the end of the meeting was a workout tracking and reminding clock.

Agenda

We planned to start off by introducing ourselves and talking a bit about who we are, where we’re from, ect. in order to break the ice. Then we wanted to show Jan the assistive devices we made for ourselves for Project 1, so she would have examples of the kinds of problems we could try to solve with our project, and have an idea of what to expect from the completed project. We wanted to ask questions about her daily life, such as her hobbies and chores, and from there try to find anything in these daily activities that was difficult or inconvenient. Once we discovered an activity that was difficult, we planned to brainstorm possible solutions and discuss them with Jan. After that, we wanted to ask Jan if she had any questions for us about the project such as the timeline, or what would happen at the next meeting in class.

Summary and Takeaways

The meeting with Jan allowed us to gain a better understanding of her life and how we could potentially help improve it.  For the majority of her career, Jan worked a desk job in substance abuse counseling.  Now retired, she mentioned that she enjoys the ability to live a less sedentary lifestyle after years of sitting.   We spent a large part of the meeting discussing the ways in which she remains active.   She mentioned multiple walking routes, weights in the living room, going to the gym, and being busy with everyday errands.  However, she also said that she does not workout as much as she would like to, and her phone is ineffective at reminding her since she can simply swipe away the reminder.   We found this problem to have great potential for an assistive device to help, and ultimately this was largest opportunity we found for a project.

Some of the notes we took while talking with Jan. We noted that exercise was important to her.

We proposed a device which Jan could use to track how often she exercised, and which would also remind her to exercise if she hadn’t been as active as she wanted. We suggested something that would fit on her kitchen counter, near her back door, after she mentioned how she normally leaves to exercise through that door. We figured placing the device there would make it easy for Jan to log when she exercises by pushing a button on the device as she leaves the house.

Jan’s kitchen counter by her back door, where she suggested placing the device.

Besides her active lifestyle we learned a lot about Jan’s mindset and what she enjoys doing.  When it comes to technology, Jan is very knowledgable.  She uses one of the recent iPhones, and gave us advice we didn’t know about  the Pittsburgh Transit app.  She adores visiting her grandson and taking care of her cat Alex who loves to socialize and play with the furniture.  We looked for opportunities to solve problems with her cat getting on the furniture and her grandson’s allergies to the cat, but the solutions were largely outside of our abilities.

Thoughts/Discussion

Overall, we all agreed that the meeting went very well. The meeting did follow our agenda for the most part, but we didn’t try to stick to it too strictly so we could allow the conversation to happen naturally. When we left  the meeting we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to make for our project, and we believe Jan also knew what to expect as we move forward in developing the device. 

If we were to conduct another interview in the future, we would probably try to stress diversity in our initial ideation phase for project ideas. One of the concerning parts of this interview was how quickly we landed on a project idea during our discussion. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we are more likely to have missed a better idea because of this early limitation in scope.

After the meeting, we had a rather specific idea of what this assistive device should be. As such, there aren’t many other questions that we had thought of to ask. We expect though, that as our project develops, there may be additional information that would be helpful.

With the end goal being an implement that sets out to improve some aspect of life for Jeff, we approached this initial meeting with the objective of finding possible leads for what such an implement might be like. The meeting was conducted on Sunday, October 20th, from 1:00-2:00 PM at Jeff’s home. The entirety of Team Jeff was present, with Emily as the interviewer, Jeff as the interviewee, and Larry as the note-taker.

Agenda:

The proposed agenda that was drafted up collaboratively in Google Docs.

Summary:

During our on-site interview, Jeff was of great help in the interview process, and we were able gain some insight into Jeff’s daily life and see the inside of his home.

He offered us a possible design that his son had come up with for a project. It was certainly appreciated that we had a design available, but unfortunately, it was rather beyond the scope of what our project could encompass.

Despite that, we were still able to have a very fulfilling interview.

As a successful owner of a custom blinds business, he’s proud of it and has every reason to be. For 12 consecutive years, his company has been awarded the super service award by Angie’s list, which fewer than 5% of companies on the site receive. This reward indicates exceptional ratings by his customers, which speaks to the quality of work he does and the quality of the product he installs in customers’ home.

Examples of his work take no more than a glance toward any window, with some of them being motorized and remotely controlled. He’s considering connecting up his Amazon Alexa to the blinds as well, so it’s not hard to tell that Jeff is no stranger to technological devices assisting in his daily life. Below is a video of a motorized blind that was very similar to one we saw in Jeff’s house.

While his desk might be piled high with papers and miscellaneous items, Jeff keeps his schedule well-organized with his phone, as expected of a professional. Many of his tools of the trade already have their own toolboxes and binders. Among equipment he mentioned were these clasps as shown below that come in a variety of colors, which he keeps in a bag. There are certainly organization solutions to organizing these clasps, but it’s hard to envision making computing play an important role for such a task.

Source: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Qg8KbGnAL._SX425_.jpg

Jeff’s grandchildren visits him fairly frequently, and he keeps them entertained by going out on excursions or with the arts-and-crafts box in their home.  Perhaps an interactive game could be interesting for his kids, though they’re in an age range that’s phasing out of playing with toys and the like, so it may not be all that functional.

We were also given a chance to check out Jeff’s car, which he uses to commute to his clients. Though the trunk looks a bit cluttered, it certainly has just about anything he needs. A binder of samples lie in the middle and a ladder that looks like its connected a scaffold allows him to walk along an elevated platform the width of most window to install brackets or whatnot.

The inside of Jeff’s car.

Takeaways:

It’s going to be a challenge to come up with something that Jeff would have a use for. At least, if he had a need for anything, it seems like he already has a good solution for it.

A device intended for infrequent use in the home is unlikely to be of use to Jeff because he and his wife keep themselves busy, often spending time outside their home.

Thoughts:

I’d say our interview went quite smoothly and felt fairly natural. We were able to learn much about Jeff’s life and share a little about ourselves in the meantime, and we were able to get a glimpse into what his home and daily life were like. Though we were able to ask just about everything on our plan in one way or another, we struggled to come up with even a few areas in his life that could really benefit from a device we could make.

Perhaps we should’ve inquired further into what sort of device would be of use to his wife, or perhaps we could’ve discussed whether a device would’ve been of use in the backyard we caught a glimpse of beyond the back porch sliding doors.

We decided to follow up with an email posing a few more questions to Jeff and his wife which will hopefully lead us to an entry point for a useful implement.