Designing New Social Media Services For Seniors’ : A Participatory Design Approach

Sammanfattning: The society is getting older. A process called aging at the bottom will come with demographic and consequently socio economic changes. Due to this tide wave of elderly I have focused my research on seniors and the need for designing new social media services for them. This thesis is focused an understanding senior’s daily life, their activities, their relationship with their family, friends and groups of interest, how are they currently using the technology and finally to find out with them possibilities for alternative social media services that can sustain or enhance their social engagement and participation. A participatory design approach has been used for the research. Different techniques like cartographic mapping future workshops, walkthrough and diary are the methods that I have chosen for the collection of data. Data gathers is analyzed through the usage of thematic analysis and the main thematic has been presented by the original expressions of seniors during the workshops. Social media is still in its begging when it comes to services for seniors and the opportunities available are huge. This research can be considered a good start also for further services in the future.