1. Briefly share your experience going through Dialogue with Time. What were some of the feelings, thoughts, challenges and insights gained while role playing an elderly person? (150 Words)
The trip to Dialogue with Time was very insightful as it walked me through facts regarding ageing, then projecting the future me (as an elderly) before allowing myself to role play as an elderly. In reality, as a young adult who has yet to experience the difficulties faced during old age, we could only see what the elderly experience through our eyes. This exhibition had allowed me to put myself in the shoes of the elderly by stimulating the problems they faced with daily. One of the exhibits was the stimulation of tremors while unlocking the door. I had a taste on how difficult it would be to insert the key into the lock with tremors and I believe that the actual tremors experienced by the elderly would be even worse. While the stimulations do not entirely represent the difficulties stimulated by them, it has helped me to understand their circumstances better, to a certain extent. That evoked an even stronger sense of empathy towards this group of people which gave me a greater reason to want to help them.
2. Drawing on your experience, can you think and list some of the benefits inherent in the design research technique of role playing? (150 Words)
- A better understanding of the “role”
- Role-player personally faces the difficult situations which are never encountered by him/herself so he/she is able to gather primary thoughts and feelings on the issue through personal encounters during the role-playing process. With personal emotions evoked, role-player will be able to delve deeper into the issue instead of just touching the surface of the issue.
- Different POVs – gathers different understanding of the same “role” by different people
- During encounters by different people, people will notice the different problems faced by each individual. With the help of role-playing, we are able to gather more inputs based on each individual’s own role-playing experience. The inputs can then be pooled together to solve the design issues faced by the relevant group of people.
3. Can you think of some contexts where role-playing can be useful to help discover and define design challenges or contribute to the development of design solutions? (150 Words)
In situations where people find it difficult to understand the actual circumstances or something that people do not feel as strongly for, role-playing will be effective in discovering and defining design challenges as it is an engaging way to expose people to the situation of the particular group that is concerned. One example would be mental illness. Most people assume they know how it is like suffering from mental illness but what they understand may differ from the actual situation. Through role-playing, people may change their initial way of thinking and allows them to see things from different perspectives (as a particular person in concern and as an outsider). That can help with giving a more all-rounded insight as compared to someone who only has one.