Our parents have been digitally excluded.
Because the technology world has been changing so fast, they are not ready to make everything inclusive for the senior citizens, and their voices are too weak to be heard. We want the world to design for the ageing by the ageing, in a way they really want.
So we have this initiative, S-Geek. S-Geek is a social enterprise, aiming at empowering senior citizens to speak out, raise social awareness, and support the corporates to make their products and services inclusive for them.
Thus, we become a step towards social equity.
A day of Granny Liu: challenges and "excuse me" ..
This project is to support the senior citizens who encounter the challenges of digital exclusion. Let's meet Granny Liu, a lady we met in Shenzhen city, moving from the countryside to raise a grandchild. Her life in Shenzhen is very challenging because of digital exclusion. At 8, she arrived at the hospital, frustrated to find that expert appointments run out online. At 10, it rains, she waited for 20 minutes before stopping an empty taxi because most of the cars were taken online. After the afternoon nap, she went to the community centre, her new friends are discussing buying stuff in PinDuoDuo because it is much cheaper than the supermarket. She wanted to but doesn’t know-how. After the dinner, she reviewed photos of family gathering and struggled to put them into a beautiful template to be a digital album with music on it. That’s her day, very challenging.
Why digital exclusion make her life so hard？
For today's China, the definition of "lifestyle" has entirely changed-the last time I used cash or credit card was two years ago; I don't need a menu in the restaurant, because there will a QR code to order and pay. As an inevitable result of the rapid development of Internet technology, superior resources are gathered on the Internet. Thus, embracing technology is the original intention of the elderly living in China now, because they want better, convenient and cheap products and services.
Ageing itself is not a problem. The problem is that the world is not ready for ageing. Because the voice of the elderly is too weak, society, enterprises and the government have not paid enough attention to this issue. Service providers have little understanding of what they need and how to design services that suit them.
The vision of S-Geek
6 workshops with 72 senior citizens and 9 experts from governments and corporates brought out fruitful voices, and we come to a conclusion that it is a truly systemic problem, that the key and the only way is to let the world get prepared for adapting to a senior-friendly mindset. According to the social movement theory, we are at a stage where we have to have to ripen the conditions and let the public aware of this issue.
So here comes s-geek, a four-stage social enterprise, spreading layer by layer like a water wave, from individuals to enterprises to the government, all of which are moving towards an ageing society. We aim to be the bridge of different stakeholders and deliver empowerment as a service, to let the world design for the ageing by the ageing. S-Geek will be a 2-year initiative, so of the year 2021, we focus on the stages of empowering and awareness.
Empowerment as a service
S-Geek services are the result of a collaborative and iterative process, to develop strategies to empower the seniors to become silver geeks who possess the knowledge, attitude and power to share opinion towards non-ageing-friendly services. Phase one look at how to access it. We initiate a set of tools and co-creation processes to co-design the fit version of mobile lectures for the senior residents with the community workers. This approach has proven to be impactful in three communities. This is how we identify and access s-geeks, and introduce them into an s-geek community.
Phase two is to make the voices of the elderly to be heard through social media. We have S-Geek Review, a user-centric review service that allows seniors to comment on different services by themselves, showing the real scenario of their use of the service. The first S-Geek Review video is produced by 4 Grannies in Lijiaqiao Community and published by the end of May.
The future of s-geek
S-Geek will be a two-year initiative, continued to look at the approaches to have a direct impact on the corporates and government next year by Jiaqi Wang and me. This idea born several years ago, when we determined our mind to be a change agent to tackle the issue of the world is too fast to care about the elderly. Through this practice, we believe by empowering s-geek to have a direct and positive impact in the world, we all become one step forward towards an equitable future. We hope that no matter how the world develops, there will always be a place for them to live happily and comfortably.
This s-geek service is for my parents, for your parents, and even for the future yourself, to have happier and comfortable later lives.
