In this project we studied users that face fear of death, and our task was to create a new service concept based on the inspiration from the users. During the project we used a number of design tools including participatory design, design probes, contextual inquiry, storytelling, focus group, affinity diagramming, 3D ideation, and much more. The project was done as part of User Inspired Design course at Aalto University School of Arts and Design in 2013.
The users we studied had various reasons to experience fear of death. One of our users suffered from thanatophobia, which means experiencing persistent fear for one's own death or the process of dying. Three of the users we interviewed did extreme sports that have a high risk of facing a sudden death: there was a freeride skier, a swordsman and a freediver. We also visited a hospice where we had a group interview with five nurses working daily with terminally ill patients.
The most sensitive and personal discussion we had was with the user suffering from thanatophobia. After our first interview with this user we felt that there was still a lot more to hear, and therefore we gave the user a diary to keep for one week. This diary was as a design probe that aims to collect information of the user in a place where the researcher cannot enter. In our case the place was the user's own private time to think throught the sensitive topic. We had a post-interview after a week, and the user had filled the diary with drawings, stickers, stories, and comic strips. The plethora of personal experiences in the diary helped us to make the discussion more vivid and profound as we could just point and ask the user to explain more.
After our user studies we went through our findings, and wrote every piece of information on a post-it. Those post-its we organized on a whiteboard into an affinity diagram. This helped us to find relations between the users we studied, and to recognize the supreme findings. We regrouped the post-its several times into new categories, which was useful for creating discussion in our group and to play around with the findings.
One of the main things we learned from our users was how much people value their relationships and the time spent with their friends and family. Another key understanding was that our users considered carefully how they used their time it being limited and unpredictable. These thoughts seemed very evident to us at the end of the project. Nevertheless we were stunned by the stories we had heard that had made our users to realize this in their lives.
We used this inspiration into creating scenarios of a service that would encourage people to meet each other, spend more time together, and to focus on the quality of the time spent.
