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Do you dread getting old?

I have recently enrolled in the course Design Thinking on Coursera. If you don't know the platform yet, I strongly recommend to pay it a visit if you're keen on learning.

In the course, a case study of "the good kitchen" was presented. In short, it was about a malfunctioning food service for elderly people in Denmark which did a 180° turn after having engaged hatch&bloom, a company specialized in driven innovation and service design. Where the elderly people who made use of the service before were ashamed of having to do so, the meal delivery service is now something they actually enjoy. In the first week alone, the company managed to quintuple their subscriptions.

After having finished the video lessons for this week, I went to facebook and saw this:

I think, copy-pasting that thought is not enough. If we care about our parents and grandparents, wouldn't it be good to actually do something about that?

Senior residences are really a dreadful place to go to. Have you been? I get to see one now and then, because I visit Rubén's grandma. Most of the time, I'm trying to smile at the people there instead of letting the horror of their malnourished, sad or empty faces get to me. But it's not easy. You see wheelchairs standing around with people sitting in them, staring into nothingness. This is their video presentation:

Doesn't look so bad, does it? I think the people in the video are the youngest ones they had at the time. And I have not seen half of the smiley faces that you see here. The place is painted in pastels, there is no color there. They really have this nice garden and from what I hear from grandma, they also engange the elderly in many activities. So let's consider this residence being one of the better ones. It is still not a nice place to live in, right? At least in my opinion.

So going back to Design Thinking, I'm thinking about evaluating whether this service is really up to its users' needs. This senior residence in particular already has a quality report, let's have a look:

Rooms: 4.2     Staff: 4.3     Price-Quality ratio: 3.4     Health care: 4.1  
Scheduled activities: 3.9     Gastronomic service: 3.7     Shared spaces: 4.1

These are interesting results, but do not say anything about how happy people are to be there. How come that the price quality ratio has such a low result? Why is no factor reaching the possible 5/5? The answers to these questions probably lie in the human factor.

With the Design Thinking approach, the first thing to investigate is the question What is?
So my idea is to go to the residence and talk to people. Let them tell me what it is they are missing. Design a questionnaire with open questions and walk around the precincts and speak to people about their wishes.

What are your thoughts? What is it you dread when thinking about living in a senior residence? Do you think you will be in one in the future? Leave a comment and let's talk about it!

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