A standing support for people with sclerosis
An aid that takes the load without taking the exercise
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The plywood standing support prototype, an angular Z-shaped frame with a lower plate for the feet, photographed on a plain floor
- Context
- Design, brugere og etik, DTU
- Year
- 2020
- Role
- Interviews, prototyping and usability testing
- Team size
- 4
- Tools
- Semi-structured interviews · Design Thinking · Think-aloud testing · Affordances and signifiers · Physical prototyping
- Contribution
- Team of 4, interviews, one of two prototypers, and usability testing
Denmark has the fourth highest incidence of multiple sclerosis in the world, at 16,542 people or 282 per 100,000, and cooking turned out to be one of the activities that costs them the most energy. We designed a standing support for the kitchen that carries the body weight while still requiring the user to stand, and tested two prototype iterations with people who actually have the diagnosis.
What the interviews found
Most of the people we interviewed had problems with cooking, since they did not have the strength to stand up for long periods. One participant described her energy budget in spoons, where a day holds around 12 and making breakfast alone costs 4, which means a third of the day is gone before anything else happens. Another said he keeps cooking as simple and as fast as possible in order to avoid spending energy on it at all. However the finding that decided the concept was the second one. Several participants deliberately avoid aids that do the work for them, since an aid that removes the effort also removes the training, and the muscles then weaken faster. One put it plainly, that if he starts using that kind of thing he does not get trained and then he collapses sooner. This means the design problem was not simply to relieve the load, and instead to relieve enough of it that a person can stay in the kitchen for longer while still standing and still using the muscles.
The concept
A support that the user leans against, with a lower plate positioned where the feet naturally go, so that standing on it keeps the support stable and stops it sliding or tipping backwards. Here the placement of the plate is doing two jobs, since it is structurally necessary and at the same time it signifies where the feet belong without anyone explaining it. The absence of a seat is deliberate, since every competing support chair we found on seniorkomfort.dk and ergoforma.dk has one, and a seat is exactly what turns the aid into something that weakens the user over time. The idea came directly out of an interview in one participant's own home, where she showed us the support chair she already had and explained what she did not like about it, being that the wheels take up too much room and that she cannot get close enough to the worktop.
Testing it, twice
We ran think-aloud tests with three participants who all have sclerosis, in their own homes and in a quiet teaching room, with one test leader interviewing and taking notes and one helper stabilising the prototype and following up afterwards, and we recorded audio in order to avoid missing anything. The first iteration worked in the sense that all three felt relief, and one described it as being able to rest her whole body weight through her hips and her upper back so that her knees could relax, while another said that supporting his back and lower back meant he was not spasming in the kitchen. However a third needed more relief than leaning alone provides and told us she would need a small seat, which is the direct tension in the concept rather than a detail. The more useful failures were about comprehension. One participant assumed the support bar was a footrest and used the chair incorrectly, and another said his first thought on seeing it was that it was a stand for a cookbook. This means the function was not obvious from the form, which is the thing the second iteration had to fix, alongside making it lower, since several participants were too short to test it properly, and making it more stable and smaller overall.
What I did
I ran interviews, I was one of two who built the prototypes, and I worked on the usability testing, while the others also took part in the research and the testing. Here the part I found most useful was the gap between what we thought the object communicated and what the first person to touch it assumed it was for.
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The standing support prototype photographed in the DTU classroom where it was tested, with chairs and a whiteboard visible behind it
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An early plywood trestle base alongside five popsicle-stick concept models exploring different support and seat forms
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A test participant, face obscured for privacy, using an early prototype at a kitchen counter during usability testing