Designing Interactive Systems for Seniors: Living on an Island

This paper presents the results of an educational experience targeted at understanding how interactive systems can support seniors. This experience builds on previous work, which included an extended set of interviews to seniors aged over 70, meant to understand their needs and wishes and to derive a set of design requirements. The paper proposes an additional exploration of the design space and widens the application of user-centered methodologies by associating a pilot study to each conceptual proposal. Besides, the paper has a special focus on a specific scenario, living on an island, characterized by peculiar difficulties for seniors, among which the danger of high tides. The experimentation led to some original results that will be described as a further contribution to the investigation of interactive systems appropriate and useful for seniors.