Focusing on spirituality and daydreaming, and designed for the inhabitants of a traditional care home, the devices look beyond stereotypes of frailty. Instead they help elderly people make connections with the world that are of interest and use to them.
The devices were developed in collaboration with researchers at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities as part of the New Dynamics of Aging (NDA) programme, a seven-year multidisciplinary UK research initiative with the ultimate aim of improving quality of life of older people.
The Photostroller, an interactive device developed by the Interaction Research Studio, in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London has recently been introduced into a care home in York to enhance the daily lives of its residents.The Photostroller shows a never-ending sequence of images drawn from the Internet, some related, others more random, like an electronic daydream. The flow can be influenced to stay close to a selected category of images, or allowed to drift away to more tenuously related subjects.
Text, Professor Bill Gaver
Photography, Dr Alex Wilkie
Project Links
http://www.gold.ac.uk/interaction/
