Reimagining gym experiences: LongevityTech health service innovation
This blogpost proposing six learnings from the course and our personal experiences, ranging from pedagogical to design-research related. Each takeway can be served as an actionable reflection and inspiration for practicing designers, students, and design educators.
Sheng-Hung Lee is a designer working and studying at MIT, and Board Director at IDSA. He is trained as an industrial designer and electrical engineer, and his approach to problem-solving is influenced by his passion for how design and technology impact and can be integrated into society.
WebsiteInstagramLinkedinThis summer we taught a 10-day design sprint workshop in Taipei City titled “Gym Experience Redesign for LongevityTech Health Services,” a collaboration between Shih Chien University Graduate Institute of Creative Industries (GICI), Smart Service Management Program, and the Taipei City Government.
The course included 25 graduate and undergraduate students from multidisciplinary backgrounds, such as management, business, industrial design, architecture, urban planning, material science, and other non-design disciplines.
Over the course of the sprint, we introduced students to a research-informed design process, as well as used tools and methods from our experimental Design for Longevity (D4L) framework. This helped them to prototype future visions for gym and fitness services (Figure 1). Our overall intention was to explore the concept of “LongevityTech.”
What do we mean by LongevityTech?
How can we shift people’s perceptions of the typical gym experience from focusing solely on functional aspects (e.g., frequency of gym visits, weight loss, selling gym memberships, physical performance and improvements) to incorporating more emotional and aspirational services (e.g., community building, integration of gym experiences with other retail services)?
The transformational shift aims to raise awareness of longevity planning, healthy lifestyles, mindsets, and behaviors. This blogpost proposing six learnings from the course and our personal experiences, ranging from pedagogical to design-research related. Each takeway can be served as an actionable reflection and inspiration for practicing designers, students, and design educators.
LongevityTech health service innovation – Six learnings:
Design research is not a search just for validation but also for inspiration
The idea of searching for inspiration calls to mind Jane Fulton Suri’s book Thoughtless Acts? Observations on Intuitive Design. The book presents a collection of thought-provoking photos from everyday life that most of us take for granted. We might not even notice why these photos matter or what makes them unique. These seemingly ordinary photos can reveal individual behaviors explicitly or implicitly.
In her book, Jane beautifully illustrates that design research – and our keen observation – can serve as a source of inspiration. She demonstrates how we can train and cultivate design research skills and attitudes in our daily lives.
As educators, what is our role in the design classroom? How can we help students understand the importance of observation in the design process? Understanding people and their behavior is complex, and research methods should not be strictly divided into qualitative or quantitative categories. We advocate for using multifaceted approaches tailored to different problem-solving phases, depending on different contexts.
In the design process, particularly in the early stages, the goal of research should be to seek inspiration rather than validation. We want students to remain open-minded and unrestrained initially, as the solutions to most challenges are unknown due to complexity and ambiguity until research is underway.
Inspired by Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor, we started our sprint with ethnographic design research methods.
For example, during students’ fieldwork in community sports centers, gyms, or public parks, we encouraged them to view themselves as “professional design anthropologists.” This involved approaching their research with curiosity and sometimes playing naïve, pretending not to know certain things to elicit more detailed explanations from participants or interviewees.
As design researchers, our goal is to capture natural behavior in the field as objectively as possible. We hope students can document data as evidence before synthesizing it to make sense of their observations and to identify users’ pain points and satisfaction points.
Lecturers focus on creating a design course experience, not simply teaching design frameworks and methodologies
Design is an applied science that necessitates both teaching and practice. From the instructor’s perspective, we demonstrated many examples from our personal projects or inspiring case studies, including potential deliverables, ideal design solutions, and various thought processes.
Rather than merely teaching D4L design frameworks and theories, we provided students with an immersive, hands-on though worksheets with actionable goals and practical how-to tips, such as reframing design challenges, determining the number of people to interview, and creating discussion guides (Figure 3).
These worksheets facilitated an environment where theory could be applied by the students immediately. Even before the prototyping phase, they had started making with one another and debating with us, the lecturers. This approach was modeled for students because we led by example: their two professors openly challenged each other with their different options.
Having two “authority figures” demonstrate differing opinions within class conversation and critique settings helped to break down the traditional hierarchy we often find in the classroom.
Additionally, during lectures, we moved around in the classroom and used our body language to engage not just the front row but the entire classroom (Figure 4). Our rigorous critiques of students’ work maintained high standards and demonstrated respect for their creative process.
Some thoughts on multidisciplinary collaboration: designers need other designers
Because we had students from a variety of backgrounds, we made sure that each team represented a variety of skill sets and that students could collaborate well with their teammates.
We recognized that participants without a design background would initially find it challenging to grasp the intentions of design and basic prototyping skills. Acquiring design capabilities or any other skills requires time, commitment, patience, and effort.
However, even for students without design skills, this 10-day workshop has the potential to transform students’ understanding of the importance of research, hands-on making, and collaboration (Figure 5).
At the start of the class, we assembled four teams of three to five students. We made sure that each team included a designer. To facilitate smooth collaboration, each team member had to take on a role (e.g., lead, photographer, presenter, and more).
This is obvious: Make sure the teams have the appropriate skills they need to excel on the project, and that everyone knows their role. However, something interesting happened.
Out of the four teams, there were four great projects. But only three of the teams worked well together. The team that didn’t work as well together was the team of three, where only one designer was present.
In the other teams there were two designers present: Team 1 had two Industrial Designers, Team 2 had two Architects, and Team 3 had two Communication Designers, while Team 4 (the only three-person team) had only one Communication Designer and two students from the International Business program.
Though we often talk about the promises of multidisciplinary teams, there is something to be said for working with someone with similar expertise: Because you speak the same discipline-specific vocabulary and share the same theoretical background, you can push one another to refine your common strengths.
Further, as you develop concepts and designs, you have support in communicating those concepts to the other team members outside of your discipline. Just as in teaching, sometimes you need to say the same thing in multiple ways to ensure communication, and when you have another designer present, that can happen by default.
Human-centered design research starts with yourself
When we started the course, we asked students to do a thought experiment: In the context of longevity, when did they last experience or witness someone struggling with their fitness goals?
We used an interactive D4L worksheet (Figure 3 and 4) to encourage students to think of anecdotes that respond to research-informed themes, such as transportation, home, family, community, education, and more.
Working in groups, students synthesized their individual experiences into a single scenario that represented challenges they had observed in their own lives. They shared experiences about their grandparents and parents struggling to exercise because they felt intimidated by the gym or afraid that it was unsafe to walk in the park. These scenarios turned into beautiful storyboards (Figure 6).
The storyboards turned into hypotheses that guided the initial round of interviews and fieldwork they did. When we started class the next day, students from two of the groups were incredibly excited: Their research had disproved their hypothesis. They had learned something new.
For example, one group had hypothesized that the elderly didn’t like going to the gym because they would prefer exercising in the privacy of their own home. However, the elderly they spoke to (through intercepts outside of a local gym) said otherwise: They didn’t want to exercise in the privacy of their home because they loved the social aspects of the gym.
The students leaned into this insight and created a concept for a fitness gym that promoted community-building: themed-workout areas around personal interests, art activities, nutritional education, and a supermarket.
They wanted the gym to be a community-oriented space catering to the diverse needs of the elderly and their caregivers in Taipei. Fieldwork had disproved their initial self-reflection, but this bolstered engagement: The students thrived in their new direction.
Thus we started a human-centered design research course, not with user research, but with research-informed self-reflection. Self-reflection built engagement from students, because they could imagine their relatives and community impacted by their design skills. It also gave them a focused perspective to support or refute as they went through the project process.
Rapid prototyping empowers participants with increased confidence
We are intrigued by Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, by Tom Kelley and David Kelley. The book highlights the importance of creating a safe environment for individuals to learn and create. In our short workshop, the spirit of making had a huge influence on students’ confidence.
After four days of design research, which included user interviews, surveys, and fieldwork studies, students developed evidence-based project goals. It was time to move into the rapid prototyping phase.
This fast, low-cost phase is intended to be an integrative and interactive process that refines initial design solutions and creates artifacts that make their research tangible and accessible to a greater audience (Figure 7).
In the course, students used low-cost materials such as thick cardboard, paper, hot glue guns, scissors, and other accessible items to prototype longevity services for fitness.
Four teams presented their prototyping results. One team cleverly used paper to build a floor map with drawing as a base and added LEGO figures and bricks to decorate the space experience (Figure 8). Although it was a very rough prototype, it effectively communicated their concepts.
The constraints of rapid prototyping in terms of time, budget, and results naturally imposed during this phase prompted participants to rethink their proposed solutions and even their core research questions. We found that prototyping not only improved student work, but also boosted their confidence in articulating their creative works.
Next, students were invited to give a five-minute presentation for Taipei City Government officials. Although brief, the presentations required significant effort to ensure the audience understood the students’ motivation, research questions, creative process, and suggested solutions (figure 9).
The students were nervous, but the best part was when they explained their ideas using their prototypes; they enthusiastically and confidently articulated their long-term strategies, potential scenarios, and the design intentions behind their proposed solutions. It reminded us that our goal is to prototype for design experiments and process improvement, as well as for confidence and inspiration.
The design consideration of scalability depends on balancing desirability, feasibility, and viability
The iconic IDEO design thinking Venn diagram illustrates the intersection of user desirability, engineering feasibility, and business viability. This course also emphasizes the importance of considering the products’ scalability.
Each team proposed excellent design solutions and prototypes to address the diverse needs of various stakeholders. Additionally, we encouraged the students to consider how to bring their solutions to market and how to scale them to create a positive social impact.
One team proposed the concept of a mobile outdoor gym service, where a truck equipped with gym equipment and a few coaches travel to designated public spaces, such as parks or plazas (Figure 10). This initiative aimed to promote the benefits of gym workouts and exercise, thereby energizing and attracting local communities.
In terms of scalability, we encouraged the team to develop a business model that offers reasonable incentives to draw public interest. For example, they could collaborate with local governments to provide LINE points – a rewards service integrated with the instant messaging app LINE, allowing users to earn and spend points.
Participants could accumulate these points and exchange them for other healthcare-related products or services. Additionally, this new service could be utilized to modify existing public sports or gym-related policies.
The challenge of scalability lies in balancing desirability, feasibility, and viability. This comprehensive consideration aligns with Victor Papanek’s perspectives in his book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, which emphasizes designing for social impact, communities, identity, culture, policies, and other broader and more complex aspects in the context of global challenges.
This article was co-written by Sheng-Hung Lee, Ph.D. Researcher at the MIT AgeLab, and Sofie Hodara, Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University.
Acknowledgement
We deeply appreciate the great support from all our course participants; Professor Tony Kuo, Vice President for International and Cross-Strait Affairs at Shih Chien University; Professor Hsieh Ming-Hung, Director of the Graduate Institute of Creative Industries at Shih Chien University; Taipei City Government; MIT AgeLab; MIT Ideation Lab; and Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD).
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