Now, let’s dive into our research.

Our original idea was entitled “The Balancing Act: Your Career, Personal Life, and Downtime”.

Every person on this earth ages in their own unique way. Various age groups and nationalities look at the world differently. The multiple thoughts and life decisions a person makes will change how they age. An individual's participation throughout their aging process is often impacted by their career choice and personal life; furthermore, individuals tend to collect in a variety of ways from their workplace. 

We broke our survey questions into four categories. The first category was aging. There were four questions from this category: 

How old are you?

What are your thoughts on the aging? 

If all current day living circumstances were unavailable, how do you see yourself aging?

Do you think you will age successfully?

The second category was career. There were four questions from this category: 

What do/did you do for living?

Do/did you enjoy your job?

Do you think you have/had an impact within your workplace?

Have you collected anything from your jobs or do you know someone who did?

The third category was downtime. There were three questions from this category: 

What is the most common thing you do during your downtime?

Do you think you utilize your downtime effectively?

How do you define participatory?

The last category was other. There was only one question from this category: 

Is there one thing of advice that you would give to a younger/older version of yourself? If so what?

We interviewed people from various diverse backgrounds. The three main races we interviewed were: Caucasian, African American and Asian. We interviewed 5 Caucasians, 3 African Americans and 5 Asians. We also interviewed 1 Mixed Race individual, but the majority of our research comes from these three race groups.

Our 15 interviewee’s also came from a variety of generations. We interviewed 8 millennials, 3 baby boomers, and 3 individuals from the traditional generation.

Now lets talk about our Data Analysis.

When coding all of our responses, we found a variety of common themes or key words such as: work, death, relationships, negativity and many more.

As we looked deeper into the data, we found we could remove some of the key themes because they were not as important as some of the others. We broke our coding into three main topics: the Aging Process which includes: health, talking about aging when you are older and aging when you are younger.

The second main theme is Mental or Non-Physical Influences: which includes: relationships, knowledge and memories

And the third theme is Participation and Collections: which includes: collections, participation, hobbies, and work

This isn’t a theme, but we also examined how individuals responded to our interview questions. So were they generally more positive or negative about the question being asked?

We found that across all races, there where 3 themes. The 3 themes/common responses involved talking about again when you are older, participation in life, and health. Maintaining your health and participating in life are also important and may impact and possibly increase having a positive outlook in life as you get older. The majority of responses tended to be very positive.

Lets now take a look back at our generation responses. The themes are exactly the same as looking at the data from a race perspective except for one difference: Age—Older.

This is only a minor difference. Various generations were focused on different ages. Millennials were focused on talking about themselves as they were older and the Traditional Generation focused on talking about themselves as they were younger. This is why this can be narrowed down to talking about age as a whole. In fact, 50% of all responses had some sort of response due to aging.

Here are our main findings. When you are younger you are focused on your overall health, you are busy working, you are building relationships, and making memories. When you are older, your health is declining, you have plenty of downtime, you are struggling to keep relationships, and you are reflecting on your memories of the past.

However, no matter how old you are, it is important to maintain a positive mindset! 45% of all answers were answered positively, this is the highest response next to age and relationships.

One thing to note, is that we talked about collections mainly in regards to the workplace. Only 11% of all of our total responses talked about collections. The information being illustrated only shows the most important parts to our analysis. Many people talked about the collection or relationships and memories.

This is what we found. As people get older, we have found that individuals have an increase in downtime. As health declines, people struggle to participate with the world around them. Relationships decline due mainly to health restrictions. It is disheartening that many elder adults are no longer able to create lasting memories. Even though life gets harder as humans age, we found that having a positive mindset improves the aging process. We, as a group, want to provide a solution to this issue. How can we maintain this positive outlook in life and improve the participation of elder adults with other generations through relationships, collections, and memories?

Now let’s move onto our brainstorming phase.

We had three initial ideas:

Creative Hub: open floorpan space with movable parts and portable to create rooms for various activities. There would be an event schedule and various  opportunities for people to participate with one another

Influence Calculator: smart watch application that tracks your conversations with other people, at the end of the day you would get an analyzed report of your conversations where would earn points for an online shop.

File System: An interactive wall that could catalog collections of other people that would be in a public space. You could interact with one another via live video almost as if they were there in front of you.

We decided to move forward with the file system or the interactive collection wall.

This wall will be designed to promote overall positivity and improve the participation of the all generations through relationships, collections, and memories.

Here is our initial user journey. You walk up to the screen and use face recognition to log into your profile. Once in your profile you can navigate to your friends, collections, a search page, and a record option. You can search people or collections. Searching people will allow you to see the collections of other individuals, add friends, and contact another person via audio or video. Searching collections will allow you and things to your collections, cancel you search, and browse other images. The record option under your profile allows you to record video, audio, and text for your collections.

When someone walks up to this wall, they will automatically be connected to their profile through face recognition. The screen will adjust to the individual’s height. The wall/section that they are using will be broken off from the original screen. If you are a new user, a screen will pop up for you to register/sign up. 

Under your profile, you will see all of your friends that you can connect with. You are able to switch between seeing your friends and your past collections. On the side, you will be able to scroll through your collections or friends chronologically or alphabetically. 

You can click on the record option on your profile to have this screen pop up. You will have the option to record audio, video, text, or drop your recording/collection into the bin. One thing to note is that audio can be transcribed into text. You will also be able to scan documents directly onto the screen. 

This bin at the bottom of the interactive wall allows individuals to dump in large amounts of data or objects that someone else or another service will upload for you onto your profile. You may also use this bin to send your collections/objects to your friends.

When searching for collections; audio, video, and text will come up that are tagged under the word you searched. You are able to swipe through all of these items, filter by collection type, and view who posted this item. Furthermore, you can save any of these items to your own personal collection. This same feature is available when your search for other people or friends.

We then began to flush out our design to prepare for user-testing. Here are 1 of our 50+ prototyping screens.

We were only able to user-test three people; however, we were able to get solid feedback from all three people to improve our final solution. This is what they said:

We need to cater to all generations. We need to make functionality our top priority.

We are now at the final step of our process: prototyping.

This Moodboard is focused on the technology. We were looking at multiple interfaces that were extremely futuristic and simple. This wall needs to be as functional as possible for all generations. We do not want to overwhelm the user.

We then began to look at color and visuals that can be implemented into this wall. We found that gradients can be effective when trying to keep a user’s attention. They are also a nice way to divide sections and categories. The use of color overlays on images is a subtle way to add characteristic to the final interface.

Here are some of our initial designs of what we are thinking some of the screens might look like. This is not the final design or color choice. We just wanted to show that were are looking at various options to find the best possible solution. This one shows the main screen not having the collections overlap.

Here is another option of what we thought profile screen might look like when the images do not overlap.

We then looked at branding. We had this idea of using a play button and using multiple triangles to symbolize all of the collections of the interface. We continued to push and push this, but we realized we needed to take a step back.

This is the final mark we came up with. We decided to pull everything back to its simplest level. The triangle pattern was way too much and the amount of color was extremely overwhelming, the total opposite of what we wanted.

Now we are going to show you a few clips of various interface points. Before we we show you those, we wanted to show you an elevation of our wall so you can all get an understanding of scale.

This screen shows what happens when you walk up to the wall. It automatically recognizes you with facial recognition.

Once on your profile, you can browse your collections. Music is one of your favorite hobbies. You have a very large collection of cd’s. Due to the increase in digital sales, you really wanted to show your collection to other people.

You wanted to see who else has a CD collection so you decided to search the interface to connect with someone else. You found something of interest and you will have the option to add it to your collection and see who also has a cd collection. Here is Ben, you want to contact him to talk about your cd collection so you decide to live video call him. Once loaded, you will be able to interact with him on the screen right in front of you.

You are a music teacher who has gave a lot of talks to your students about various genes of music. You can record your knowledge of music so other people can see. As of today, you have 23 audio recordings about your knowledge of music. On your profile screen tap the record feature. Make sure to select audio and record your text talk about music.

In the collection bin, you have multiple options. You can drop your physical items into the bin to be collected or duplicated. You can ship some of your cd’s to your new friend ben so he can listen to them. You have some cd’s you would like to duplicate, dum them into the bin and they will be ready in 5 minutes. If you ever need help or have any issues with the interface, you can always click the assistant button to have a real person assist you with your problem.

Thank you for coming out to listen to our presentation! We hope you enjoyed the solution we developed from the topics of aging, participation, and collections entitled E-Archive.