Empathy role play: Glaucoma

Exploring how design can be more accessible and equitable by putting ourselves in the shoes of people.

Context

This assignment is part of the course "Inclusive Design", part of the Master in Strategic Product and Service Design at the University of Mondragon.

Challenge

The activity consists of simulating the visual difficulties that these users face in their daily lives.

Together with research/task planning, also involves assessing the effectiveness of current interventions and proposing improvements based on lived experiences.

Goals

Understand and empathize with people with glaucoma, in order to explore how design can be more accessible and equitable.

Tools

-> Glaucoma simulation glasses
-> White cane or sight stick

Task planning

A route is planned with the aim of identifying specific obstacles:

Results of the experience

This role-play is essential to witness a real scenario and identify specific difficulties such as reading, driving, recognising faces or performing activities requiring peripheral vision, as well as to understand the emotional and psychological impact such as frustration, dependency or fear.

As vision becomes blurred and narrowed, and depth perception is affected, visual limitations can cause a sense of physical insecurity, which may cause the user to adopt more tense postures, leading to muscle stiffness and fatigue. As observers, the person with glaucoma may appear inattentive or distant, especially in social settings such as the cafeteria, where it is difficult to recognise people approaching from the side.

In terms of stress or fear, the user may feel anxious when confronted with an environment that has suddenly become strange and unpredictable. This constant state of alertness has left us mentally exhausted, creating a sense of vulnerability and fear of possible accidents. The combination of these factors makes the experience overwhelming, especially for those of us who have never had vision problems.

It has been difficult to detect obstacles such as poles, bicycles or people walking, which creates stress and fatigue when for example we have crossed the road at the zebra crossing.

When shopping, we experienced difficulties in locating products on the shelves, or in reading labels or prices. However, we would like to highlight the difficulty at the time of payment, where the loss of peripheral vision and communication with the shop assistant generated stressful situations.

It is important to note that a brief experience with glasses is not sufficient to fully understand the impact of glaucoma on daily life. To obtain a more accurate and useful analysis of the difficulties faced by a person with glaucoma, additional assessments would be necessary.

Conclusions

As product designers, it is our responsibility to ensure that our solutions are inclusive and accessible to all. This learning reminds us that the true value of design lies in its ability to improve the lives of all people, without exception.

It should be noted that the solutions, feelings or thoughts adopted by real users with glaucoma, and their variations in living conditions, are not fully captured in an exercise of a few hours.

Additional tools, such as user interviews, shadowing, persona building and journey maps, should accompany the research for a more complete and accurate understanding. Above all, we want to avoid hasty conclusions and develop more effective and holistic solutions that respond to the real needs of users.

This practical exercise gave me a visceral understanding of the constraints and challenges faced by these users, which helped me to question and re-evaluate the assumptions we often make, including the design research process itself.

Immersion in their reality taught me the importance of considering the diversity of capabilities from the early stages of product and service development.