When developing prototypes for a problem that you define it is hard to stick to the single problem you defined at the beginning. The subject of the ageing society and the result, which is a large diversity of employees with different needs and problems, is one of immense size. Interview the target group and you will come across hundreds of problems which can’t be addressed all at once. So what do we do? PRIORITIZE and start prototyping.
We came across three main problems when it comes to distraction, visual privacy, noise/sound and social media.
In conducted field-research which consisted of interviews we found that social media is only distracting when it comes to people who grew up in the era of social media and smartphones. Older respondents didn’t seem to bother much about this issue. The visual aspect of privacy and the noise around them were the most distracting factors.
As of yet we are creating an experiment where we try to alter the attitude of workers towards each other and their environment to minimize the distraction, among others, caused by passing people, chatting people, music that is being played and collaboration in general to maximize concentration and thus productivity. By grouping people together and make them aware of their environment and co-workers we hope to spark the need to take others’ type of work and the needs in order to complete this satisfactory into account. Will they alter their behaviour and see that it will benefit them as well? Or will they stick to their own habits because it’s easy to?