Designing Reflection Activities for Students Doing Co-Design with Older Adults

By Wendy Roldan and Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang

March 7, 2020

In this blog post, Wendy and Dawn share their collaborative process to design and use a wide range of reflection activities with college students engaging in weekly co-design sessions with older adults. We recognize there exists a community of researchers and designers already interested in doing reflection. If you are an educator interested in reflection, supporting student learning, and/or scaffolding students’ sense making process, this blog post might serve as inspiration for you. We share snippets of who we are, how and why this collaboration started, what we did, students’ initial reactions to the activities, and close by reflecting on what we learned from this process.

Background. We are both PhD students in a unique interdisciplinary department at the University of Washington. As Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) graduate students we came together through our core commitments to people, to equity and inclusion, and to the design process. In HCDE, we offer directed research groups (DRG) as a 10-week opportunity to collaboratively explore a topic of interest between undergraduate and graduate students. This work was in the context of Dawn leading a DRG on co-design with older adults.

Dawn is a PhD student advised by Dr. Julie Kientz with an interest in understanding the collaboration that happens in co-design sessions between older adults and designers and ways it affects perceptions of aging and technology. This past quarter, she brought together students as designers to participate in co-design sessions with older adults to design an idea of a health and well-being technology for older adults. The designers and older adults spent six-weeks in co-design teams going through the human-centered design process to understand and define their design space and their user. Their resulting work together was a paper prototype of their health and well-being ideas.

Wendy is a PhD student with an interest in designing equitable learning experiences for all learners in the context of engineering and design. For the past three years she has been doing research on supporting reflection in engineering education with her advisor, Dr. Jennifer Turns. Over the course of her graduate education, Wendy has designed and used reflection activities for a number of research projects, including a seminar on visual notetaking and for making sense of her graduate school experiences.

What we did. During their first meeting, Dawn shared with Wendy that she wanted a way to capture students’ reflections throughout the quarter to help students make sense and document their experiences doing co-design with older adults. Dawn wanted weekly activities that were low-effort given that the students would already be spending much of their time at the co-design sessions, while also allowing for deep reflection moments throughout.Wendy gave Dawn access to all of the projects in which she captured student reflections. The resources included activity instructions, reflection prompts, and selected prior student responses. The resources were helpful to Dawn because it provided her with a framework and starting point of how it could be adapted and applied to her DRG. Seeing prior example student responses to the reflection activities were especially helpful in anticipating when to use an activity in the quarter. For example, it would be difficult for a student to reflect across experiences in the beginning weeks of the quarter when they would have had limited design sessions with the older adults.

Dawn was excited by the creative ways that could support student reflections on recent experiences as well as their cumulative experiences. After the first meeting, Dawn took all the resources and examples that Wendy shared and chose the order in which she wanted to present the activities to her students based on her expertise.

For their second meeting, Dawn asked Wendy clarifying questions and advice on how to explain the activities to students. Dawn also got feedback and asked questions about the line-up of activities planned for the upcoming quarter. Throughout the quarter Dawn would share quick insights into how it was going with Wendy.

For their third meeting, Dawn and Wendy met to debrief about how the reflection activities were received and the student responses that came from them. At this point they decided to write up a blog post documenting this project for others to read about and potentially learn from!

The reflection activities.

• Looking ahead activity: students responded to a question about their expectations for the co-designing sessions. Then students looked for an image online that represented what they are looking forward to and what they are worried about.
• Micro-reflection: students responded to questions about their last co-design session such as, what was rewarding, frustrating and surprising. They also sketched something significant about their experience.
• A photo and haiku: students took a picture that represented how they felt about their last co-design session with older adults and wrote a haiku about their photo.
• Dice reflection activity: students gathered in trios and each took on one of three roles, interviewer, interviewee or notetaker. They were given a dice where each side was a different color. They are also given a sheet of questions that are in columns that correspond to the colors on the dice. Students rolled the dice and the interviewer asked a question in the column with the same colors. The notetaking typed up of the ideas being shared about looking back, thinking about, and projecting forward.
• Collective meaning making: students explored what they learned collectively over the past quarter. Each student responded to three prompts, what co-design sessions meant to them, the things they learned, and factors that contributed to that learning. Then as a group the students and Dawn looked for themes across each prompt.
• Supporting future designers: students created a document that could be shared with future designers who would like to co-design with older adults. Examples suggested were a letter, poem, a collection of images or aspirations of future work to be done.
• Making a ‘zine: students wrote blurbs about their most important experiences in co-designing with older adults that were later created a mini magazine that was shared with each student as a final artifact of the DRG.

Student reactions to the reflection activities.

• Challenging prior conceptions of doing reflection. The students in the DRG said they enjoyed the reflection activities because the activities were outside of their imagined traditional reflection essay educators ask students to do. Students liked that the activities were fun, had limited writing, but were still asking them about significant topics.
• Appreciating different creative pathways. Students said they enjoyed the different ways to express themselves (via pictures, haikus, blurbs) while still learning something new about their experience doing co-design with the older adults. One student said that doing the haiku activity early on helped set the tone that they were going to be doing fun activities. Another student said that they felt the haiku might have been too much because they found themselves wondering if they should focus on the structure of the poem or on the content of the poem. These varied reactions to form of the same reflection activity are important for educators to keep in mind.
• Embracing group sharing to learn from each other. When asked how they felt about sharing their reflections with others in the DRG, students said they really liked having their reflections to discuss everyone’s experience. Within the big group, they were each doing the same reflection activity but reflecting on different aspects of the co-design sessions and then sharing with their peers. One student said that having the question prompts for each reflection activity made it less stressful to share because it wasn’t an open question of “How did the session go” rather specific discussion points.
• Wishing the older-adults had reflected with them. Interestingly, students expressed an interest in having the older adults from the co-design sessions do the reflection activities with them. A good number of students agreed this would have been very helpful to hear how they were experiencing the sessions. Hearing this suggestion from students prompted us to think about how everyone designers (students in the case), researchers (Dawn and Wendy), and participants (older adults) can reflect on the co-design process throughout and collectively make sense of their experiences as a group.
• Brainstorming future reflection activity ideas. When asked about future reflection activities, students said they wished they could have created something in 3D. Other students expressed a desire for the reflection prompts to help them connect to other experiences they have had (for example, in other co-design settings) or future experiences they might have (for example, as future designers).

Why we did it. There are commonly held perceptions about aging, older adults and technology from the general population and by older adults themselves, such as they are not interested in technologies or have a harder time learning new technologies. While this may be true to some, it is not true for all of the aging population. Dawn’s study aimed at providing a space to explore and sometimes challenges those perceptions. Design students and older adults were teamed up to work together but also, to share perspectives about health and well-being and because of this, Dawn wanted ways students could share their experiences over time. Having done research on supporting engineering students in making sense of complex topics through reflection Wendy helped Dawn scaffold her students throughout the quarter with reflection activities to name their key learnings. At first, Dawn considered using one activity throughout the quarter, however, was concerned that it might become a rote activity rather than a deeply reflective one. Having inspiration from Wendy’s activities (both the instructions and example student responses), Dawn was able to use a total of seven different reflection activities that each had different dimensions of whimsical and creative, drawing and writing, individual and collective.

What was fun.

Dawn: I think having a different activity every week to reflect on experiences was fun. It was fun to use pictures, haikus or written words to share experiences. Through this, I got to hear funny stories, inspiring revelations and challenges that the students have experienced when doing co-design with the older adults. I had fun engaging with the activities too. My favorite activity was the trios. There were some interesting prompts that brought out different ways to describe my experiences like, naming an ice cream flavor to describe your experience and what would you tell your 12-year old self about designing with older adults.

Wendy: It was fun to hear how Dawn was reacting to her students’ reactions to the reflection activities. When we met on the third day, she brought the zine she had made for her students and I saw her pride as an educator on what the students had created. It was also fun for me to share my resources and see Dawn take them up given her unique context, research topic, and community of learners she was working with.

What was challenging.

Dawn: I think the activities were great. I prepared them and reviewed them before asking students to do them. However, I didn’t do as much preparation for discussing and sharing the activities. We usually did one of two things, share what we wrote in a large group or work in small groups to find common themes across student responses. I think if I were to do these activities again, I would create more structure for sharing and have a clear goal of what students should take away from the reflection activity. For example, how does this reflection activity connect to the overall experiences? Or, can students use this reflection activity in another context like a different class or a personal experience? Another thing that was challenging was having enough time. Our student meetings were an hour, an hour goes by quickly! Sometimes, we would need to talk about the upcoming co-design session and that would leave little time to dig into the reflection activity they completed before the meeting. I think having a longer meeting would have been beneficial.

Wendy: In supporting Dawn, one thing that was challenging was trying to figure out how much to give Dawn from my prior projects. I worried I would overwhelm her by sharing five google drive folders of reflection activity options and that it would make it difficult for her to select just enough activities for her students. The next time I met with Dawn she told me she had gone through all of the materials and ordered them in what she thought was best for her students. She had also throughout the activities and as opposed to simply copying and pasting my instructions she asked clarifying questions of the pedagogical reasoning for the reflection activities. I would love to support other educators like Dawn who are interested in designing reflection activities for their contexts but I wonder if this is feasible without our three in-person check-ins. I think if I just made the reflection activities publically available something would be missing.

What we learned.

Dawn: Student reflections about their learning experiences are important. I would say every class could benefit from reflection. Through reflection, students may be able to connect what they are learning to their personal experiences and perceptions. Quarters are short, but there are opportunities for growth and a-ha moments. The variety of reflection activities kept things interesting and allowed students to think about their experiences in different ways.

Wendy: Educators like Dawn care deeply about helping college students make sense of their experiences. Yet, educators might use the same reflection activities that can seem repetitive to students or not adequately capture the depth of reflection thoughts they have. Dawn found limited examples of reflection activities for college students online. From this experience I learned that maybe there is a need for more creative, feasible, and intentionally designed reflection activities for students in higher education.