Photography is one of my favourite user-centred research tools. Simply put, a photo allows you to show someone else who wasn’t there. Often we get asked in workshops about getting permission to take photographs at a client’s business. Or how to get access to someone in their home, which is a personal space. The answer could be as simple as give a camera to the person instead.

Anthony Levin-Decanini reconnected after meeting a few years back at a design conference. He worked on a project called Aphasia Talks, that used photography as a method to give a voice to stroke victims who suffer difficulty producing, using or understanding words. Aphasia can impair any or all of the abilities to speak, read and write. What a fantastic approach to empower people to communicate, as well as build empathy with a particular group that would have difficulty communicating their needs.

PhotoVoice is a research technique, as well as non-profit organisation whose mission is to bring about positive social change for marginalised communities through providing them with photographic training with which they can advocate, express themselves and generate income.

Brendan Gleeson made a presentation at the Institute of Technology Sligo yesterday on Designing Child-Friendly Cities. Not to be confused with the Irish actor, this Brendan is Director of the Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Austraila. At Crayola we never addressed the concept of the child-friendly city, though we certainly agreed with the necessity of “places for wild, unstructured play” in child development.

The talk was introduced as less about “how” and more about “why.” The imperative is pretty clear when you begin to consider how the built environment affects child well-being, particularly within urban areas, where devoid of enlightened planning, gobble up green spaces, as well as market-driven compaction of housing plots. The cult of materialism and individualism has produced wealthier, yet fatter, sicker and less happy kids.

The conversation was dense with the forces that conspire against our most dependent and vulnerable citizens, yet there was enlightened commentary around how child-friendly societies are designed to be more caring and civil to all, and have longer-term outlooks around solutions. We also need to consider the benefits of getting older people together with younger people, as opposed to segregating them into specific spaces.

The basis of our thinking around the importance of user-centred design is to lead with the user. This certainly isn’t the only approach to innovation, but it could reduce the risks of market failures like the Ifbot with Japanese elderly, where it turns out that robots turn off senior citizens.

“Most (elderly) people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical. They want to be able to get around their house, take a bath, get to the toilet and that’s about it,” said Ruth Campbell, a geriatric social worker at the University of Tokyo.

Jitterbug, a newcomer to the mobile phone industry realised that their products, handsets, were only one part of the overall mobile phone experience. They applied liberal doses of design thinking, coming up with usable features and simplicity to suit extreme users, like technophobes and aging consumers.

Providing familiar touchstones to ease the mobile-phone experience became a major part of Jitterbug’s design after early research showed that older users found conventions like signal strength meters unfamiliar and confusing. Instead, when you open a Jitterbug phone it emits—get this—a dial tone. “If there’s no dial tone, you can’t make a call,” Harris says. To reach a Jitterbug operator, who can place calls or answer questions for you, dial 0.

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Not two words you expect to see together, nonetheless I have been blown away by the ambition of the new TRIL centre (Technology Research for Independent Living). In a joint venture between Intel and the IDA, the team at TRIL are taking design for accessibility to new levels in their approach to some of the most common human problems as we age. They describe themselves as:

“a coordinated collection of research projects addressing the physical, cognitive and social consequences of ageing, all informed by ethnographic research and supported by a shared pool of knowledge and engineering resources.”

I would say that they are taking core design principles and applying them to one of the largest problems we face: the aging population. We really want to work with these people.

While traveling in London, my son came up with a clever design solution. My wife had lost the covers to her iPod earbuds and we stopped in a Virgin Megastore and purchased a pack of assorted color replacement pads. My 11 year-old son instantly requested a single red pad. I asked him if this was some sort of quirky fashion statement like his mismatched socks, to which he replied, “No, it’s so I can tell the right from the left without having to look for the tiny letters.” Brilliant. Not only practical, but arguably a more universal solution for anyone that might have a hard time reading the type.