The 2nd Design Thinking session of the CAPTAIN project was conducted from mid-December to mid-January by three pilot partners (AUTH, INTRAS and AMEN) in their countries, Greece, Spain and Cyprus, with the active involvement of CAPTAIN stakeholders’ community.
The three sessions were held as follow-up meetups between the CAPTAIN team and CAPTAIN’s primary end-users (older adults, formal and informal caregivers) and were scheduled in two parts. In the first part, the project team members shortly presented the results of the 1st Design Thinking sessions and summarized the main problems and solutions, provided by the CAPTAIN stakeholders, concerning the most common everyday life problems that older adults face and the ways they find to mitigate their affection in their daily routines.
During the second part, the team presented what CAPTAIN technology can offer to help older adults deal with their daily problems. With the guidance of CAPTAIN’s facilitators, all participants were asked to provide solutions to the problems of the 1st Design Thinking sessions based, this time, on CAPTAIN technology. Personas, concept scenarios and personal stories were used to motivate participants to express their views.
All participants felt included and very willing to provide their opinions and to share their own experience and knowledge. The most interesting thing was that in most of the cases the willing of older adults to help was so strong that they acted as another facilitators, supporting the CAPTAIN team by explaining other participants the process and even guiding some of them throughout the whole session. On their side, once again, all the pilot partners appeared very satisfied with the active involvement of end-users and the rich in, both terms of quality and quantity, input they gathered.
Also, the CAPTAIN stakeholders admitted that they feel active members of the European CAPTAIN community and their views are seriously taken into account by the CAPTAIN consortium. In this framework, most of them spread the message that “the better of this experience is sharing with other people” and almost all of them were strongly interested on taking part on future sessions.