Visiting Hackney Silver Surfers

I had an opportunity to visit the Hackney Silver Surfers centre before my presentation day on Monday the 10th. The purpose for my visit was to familiar myself with the environment before hand and visit the staff at the centre as well as evaluating my presentation strategy by speaking to one of the staff Mr. Rick, also possibly observe the kind of activities that are taking place within the centre and find out more about the IT equipments in place and the kind of training provided to the members.

All of the members at the centre are aged over 50 and there is a wide range of activities that they engage on during the sessions to encourage their creativity and improve their basic IT skills.

Hackney Silver Surfers

Hackney Silver Surfers is an Age Concern Hackney project providing free computer training and free Internet access to everybody over 50 in Hackney.

More information about Hackney Silver Surfers can be found at: http://lawns.org.uk/

I have already posted an introduction about my research to the Hackney Silver Surfers website and have been invited to give a presentation on Monday the 10th of August. This will be a good opportunity for me to present my ideas and explains the reasons for my research to the group with the help from one of the staff at the centre Mr. Rick Crust.

Supervisor

Shortly after the submission of my proposal, I was advised by Bob to communicate with Ms Suzette Kieth regarding my research. She is a Research Fellow at the IDC and I managed to speak to her on the 18th of July.

One of the research areas that Suzette has specialised and still works on is the “Usability and accessibility by the more mature or older person, with or without minor impairments.” After communicating my area of research with Suzette, she introduced me to the Hackney Silver Surfers.

Also, She advised me on considering the following points in performing my research:

1: Ethical approval:
To check with Bob about arrangements for ethical approval and getting 'informed consent' from my interviewees.

2: Methodology:
She suggested interviews and 'workshops' with a small number of people and she advised me do this early enough in the project to get some background context, and so that what I learn can influence my design development.

3: Getting comments on my design:
Using a simple mock up to demonstrate my proposal and then describe the story around the parts that I cannot mock up.

She also suggested two research papers (listed below) that has so far been a great deal of help in understanding and identifying the means necessary for planing and performing my research.

• Kurniawan, S., Nugroho, Y., Mahmud, M. (2006) A Study of the Use of Mobile Phones by Older Persons. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
• Eisma, R., Dickinson, A., Goodman, J., Syme, A., Tiwari, L., Newell, A. F., Early user involvement in the developement of Information Technology-related products for older people. University of Dundee, Dundee. University of Glasgow, Glasgow. University of Abertay Dundee, Dundee.

Thesis Proposal

The followings are my research areas/topics for the thesis that are all relative within the field of ICT and I will need to narrow it down to a more specific research area, but as we discussed before, my area of interest is "video communication and its affects on family relationships as well as the usability issues with the technology used by senior members".

Here are some questions or facts that I have considered while performing my research:

- What are the impacts of the Internet and social networking tools on the senior members?

- Familiarity of the senior users with the ICT and user requirements of this group?

- The affects of ICT on developing relationships between senior adults, their peers and families.

- The use of ICT tools to maintain communication between families over long distance.

- Infiltration of IM technology and other social networking tools and its effects on domestic domain.

- Usability of human-computer interactions for senior learners.

On performing the background reading for my thesis, I will be looking at my previous research and experiments from my design project that was concerned with the use of instant messaging devices within the domestic domain.

Digital communication tools are becoming more and more pervasive in our daily lives and staying in touch regardless of time or location has become an important part of our living. But as the technology advances it leaves behind those who are not up to the speed with this rapid growth due to their age or location and condition of their living. Now the question is that "is the new technology considering the needs and requirements of this group of users?"

Also, with the creation of social networking technologies, we can see that people are developing "cyber relationships" locally and over long distances with friends and families, I am one of those people who uses social networking websites such as facebook or instant messaging programs to stay in touch with friends and family back home but is the current information communication technologies suitable for the need of those senior adults who are not computer literates?

When it comes to using the Internet and social networking technologies such as Blogs and messengers, we can see that there is a huge choice of tools that can provide us with the means to communicate with one another, but I would like to concentrate more on those tools that are media rich and can provide us with a sort of "all in one" communications tools. For instance Skype is on of those media rich tools that provides us the means necessary to establish a textual, audio and video communication, I use Skype to talk to my parents regularly since it is a cheaper and more effective way of communication. Simply being able to see one another through a webcam and video makes a huge difference on family relationships, it gives the user the feeling of closeness.

But at the same time, if there is no one to help my parents to set up the computer and run the program, they will not be able to interact with the computer, therefore will not be able to use the technology for its intended purpose, so another big issue here is the usability of human-computer interactions and the use of the technology for the elderly users which I would like to investigate in more depth.

This is the starting point for my research and I will try to extract a more specific area as I develop my investigation, I have already done user trials for my design project and will continue to do so with the targeted user group as well as employing other methodologies such as user testing, questioners, observations, interviews and looking at more sources of information, literature search and case studies.