E2D3S2 · Education and Engagement for inclusive Design and Development of Digital Systems and Services

Education and Engagement for inclusive Design and Development of Digital Systems and Services

The starting point for the “Education and Engagement for inclusive Design and Development of Digital Systems and Services” (E2D3S2) project was that older people are often unable to use interactive digital systems and services, such as e-government and e-shopping, or technologies that might enhance their interpersonal communication, such as social media. This is a concern because older people are a growing percentage of the population in most European member states, reaching as much as 20% of the population currently. Moreover, being able to use these technologies facilitates interaction with modern government and commercially based services that are increasingly being deployed online as the standard means of interaction. On a socio-economic level, being able to use these services can provide substantial economic benefits to society by helping older people remain active members of society; stay productive in the workplace; and live independently for longer. This can provide savings to currently overburdened social security, health and other public services. In addition, access to digital systems and services enables older people to take advantage of many innovative systems that can help them maintain and improve their quality of life. Finally, on a wider societal scale, enabling access and not side-lining (or “designing-out”) older people can help preserve the human resources capital represented by their individual and combined experiences, so that it can be communicated to younger generations. The E2D3S2 project approach was assist designers and developers of digital services and systems, by giving them the necessary tools to understand and learn how to create more inclusive systems and services that would be designed with the inclusion of older people in mind, in the form of guidelines embedded in educational material. This approach is beneficial as well for designers and developers, as it offers them new competencies, necessary for making systems and services accessible to all across the territories of the European Union. To accomplish this approach, guidelines that are evidence-based needed to be created, evaluated, and put into a form that enhances take-up. Thus, the project had two main objectives: • to create highly usable evidence-based guidelines to support the design and development systems and services for all, but especially older users • to embed these guidelines in a short online course. Such short courses have been shown to be attractive to professionals who seek to acquire new knowledge and skill sets to make them more valuable to their employers, or to find new employment opportunities

Data: CORDIS, © European Union