Designing Interactive Systems for Seniors: An Educational Experience

This paper describes the results of a three years educational design experience targeted at collecting seniors' needs and wishes and to identify some possible answers through the proposal of a set of conceptual projects. The interaction design experience involved more than 150 undergraduate students who interviewed about 60 seniors aged 70 or more and then worked on their proposals. This paper reports the most interesting conceptual projects, organized by topic and complemented by observations about the challenges faced by the young designers, with the final goal of sharing them for inspiring further design and development.