Staying connected is an important part of designing for access and inclusion, but how do you engage with socially isolated people to find out the cause of their loneliness? They are disconnected to community and not willing to share their state of loneliness. But there is a way to co-design a solution for late-life loneliness without close contact.
Newspaper articles deemed as human interest stories elicit most letters from readers. So, is there a way to turn this into a method for finding out about loneliness in the community? The COVID pandemic created a wave of isolation resulting loneliness for a lot of people. But how can you engage isolated people in research? – they are after all, isolated and disconnected. The newspaper turned out to be a really good way to engage hard-to-reach people.
The title of the article is, Co-designing a solution against late-life loneliness with older adults through journalistic research in a newspaper. A really interesting way of conducting research.
Abstract
This paper presents a comprehensive reference for an innovative low-contact co-design approach, aimed at mitigating sample bias commonly found in traditional co-design workshops for eHealth technologies. By partnering with a regional newspaper (134 000 readers), we engaged the broader public in the co-design process, to tackle the issue of late-life loneliness. We employed co-design fiction, dilemma-driven, and empathic design methods, integrating these within journalistic content to prompt the reader responses. This initiative attracted 77 responses, including 34 from older adults (65+ years), 27 of whom shared personal experiences with loneliness. Our findings highlight the potential of low-contact, co-design via newspapers to foster inclusive participation, overcoming the limitations of conventional workshops, and enabling engagement with a more representative population sample.