1 Experience Design for Elderly Living Design of ‘Birdy Tabletop’, a communication system Alistair Jones*, Masanori Godai*, Gabrielle Le Bihan*, Anne Guenand** *M2 students, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, BP 60319, 60203 Compiègne Cedex, France alistair.jones@etu.utc.fr, masanori.godai@etu.utc.fr, gabrielle.le-bihan@etu.utc.fr, **Roberval Lab., Product Design, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, BP 60319, 60203 Compiègne Cedex, France, anne.guenand@utc.fr Abstract: This paper presents a novel communication device developed using experience design and by taking the subjective values of the final user in the early steps of the design process. In this case, the system is dedicated to French elderly women with limited mobility and limited technological understanding, enabling them to communicate with members of their social group who are in the proximity of their homes. The method is based on extensive gerontology research, face-to-face interviews and three user co-design sessions, which necessitated the development of low-fidelity prototypes. As a result of our research, we propose Birdy, an interactive tabletop system. Keywords: Interaction design, elderly living, robust design, participative design, interactive tabletops 1. Introduction The population of senior citizens in industrialized countries is greatly increasing in number and percentage. As the generation of baby-boomers reaches old age, the identity of this social group is changing rapidly in ways that are difficult to measure and to understand [1]. Our conventional perspectives of old age are being challenged more than ever, especially in the case of female seniors. Women in old age live longer than their male counterparts, and are more likely to find themselves living alone. Since living alone is a popular and important option, much research has focused on assisted-living solutions for aging in place. Assisted-living solutions are typically designed for monitoring the physical health and security of the elder. Often, the role of monitor rightly falls upon trusted members of the elder's social network, but designers often demonstrate a limited understanding of an elder's social needs, and seldom seek to connect the elder to friends outside of the family. We seek to distinguish ourselves from prior research by leveraging the extensive gerontology research and previously unexploited insights to elder's social networks to provide a device who's primary objective is increasing friendly casual communication among elder's social networks. We believe this has the potential to provide great long-term benefits and happiness for elders. In this paper, we present a design for providing a socio-technical system to help elder women keep in touch within a close community of their friends. Though we designed and tested for women, as they are more likely to find themselves living alone, there are no explicit reasons for which our design could not serve elder males, as well. A preliminary state of the art on gerontology and elderly living is presented in section 2. Section 3 explains the method, details group interviews and discussions with a panel of elderly women, and presents some criteria of variability in the experience of living revealed through the experiments (section 3.1). Section 3.2 presents the robust design of an interactive tabletop, including the criteria of variability, and introduces concerns from the potential users regarding the final proposal. The section 4 is dedicated to discussion and conclusion.