Elderly Stock Investor
Service Design for DESIS09
Elderly Stock Investor is a project of DESIS09 found by DESIS-China and and collaborated with Politecnico di Milano. It is a didactical and researching project for design-oriented phenomenon observation and exploration of design for Chinese social innovations.
Elderly Stock Investor is a service design for a special group of neglected people and discuss about the ageing society with design approach. It is not a creative design, but an improvment of the folk wisdom.
All the models are hand-made.
Group members: Jing Sun, Haoyu Zheng, Yin Qin, Junting Xu
June, 2009
With the popularity of online trading, many stock investors have left the business hall, while the elderly are taking ove it. Therefore, the business hall is becoming a recessive elderly community in Chinese society.However, some elders do not pay much attention on the changes of stock market, but do some recreational activities in small groups. Most of them arrived at the business hall at 9 a.m. and leave after 3 p.m.. Some of them eat lunch there.
We are so exciting about the phenomenon, because it is contrary to our general knowledge about the stock business hall and full of Chinese characteristics. We want to know why these elders gathered here and what we could do to help the floor of stock exchange transform into the community of elders.
1.OBSERVATION
Firstly, we visited several stock offices in Wuxi, China and took many photo and video materials of the environment and people, then, we chose one stock office to do our case study.
We got the permission to do research with the help of staff working in the office. In the first few days, we just took video of the daily activities of them and checked to find interesting point.
Business Activities (Less than 2 hours every day) :
1.Watching the stock screen 2.Doing business on the machine 3.Watching financial news in the midday 4.Printing delivery list before leaving etc.
Entertainment and Rest:
1.Reading newspapers 2.Playing cards 3.Knitting 4. Trim vegetables for cooking 5.Gossiping each other 6.Having a rest on chair 7.Eating lunch etc.
2. INTERVIEW
At the same time, we talked with the clerks, gatekeeper, cleanner, security guard to know the life of the elderly stock investors with the view of spectators and asked for their perspective of this change.
Later, we went back to talk with the elderly themselves to see why they got together there after retire, what they used to do there, and their advice of the transform. We used interviews instead of questionnairs to experiment 27 elderly stock investors in the office to get their ideas.
3. CASE STUDY
We chose 4 elderly stock investors to follow their daily activities for the detail research.
4. USER GAME
The user game experiment method is from the on-going design-method study. We selected some interesting photos from the previous research and made series of cards with the key words we were interested in. Then, we asked the elderly stock investors to make stories by using the cards and photos.
We did this experiment to get their understanding of the interesting point of ours.
5.INTERESTING POINTS
1). The elderly stock investors get together here because of the stock business, but they come everyday not because of the stock exchange. They come here for the social activities after retire.
2). They use 20% time to do the stock business while 80% time to do entertainment.
3). The items they could not live without in the community: 1.Mobile phone, 2.Packet with some stock card and notes, 3.Hand-made bag hanging behind on the back of chairs.
The mobile phone they use are simple-function and low-price. Normally, they only use them when make phone calls and when they need to count the exchange.
The elderly stock investor always take a small pocket with their exchange card and some notes of the stock.
Besides, many of them, especially the female elderly investors, made some bags to hange on the back of the chair. There are two functions, first, putting their belongs such as cups, glasses, knitting works; second, they use them to occupy the seat.
6. BALLOON MODULE GAME
Based on the interesting points we found, we made some modules with balloons and cardboards to simulate some scenes might happen between the elderly stock investors. We would like to put ourselves in the position of the elderly investors to get a deep understanding of their live states.
7. DESIGN CONCEPT
Through the large mount of research and experiments, our design concept is gradually clear.
We would like to design a service system to facilitate the elderly stock investors' business and entertainment activities in the stock office.
Our design compose of two parts--service platform and toolkit.
The Service Platform
We hope to help the people in the stock office to build a service platform to facilitate their communication. This is the integration of their daily activities. We are thinking about creating a handheld device based on the platform in the future.
We design the toolkit and test it with elderly stock investors to let them experience the service platform. There are three modules -- a handheld device, a pocket and a bag.
