Senior Design Challenge
JANUARY-JUNE 2025, HANOVER, NH
BACKGROUND
The Senior Design Challenge is an interdisciplinary capstone course for undergraduate students at Dartmouth College. In this course, teams of students use human-centered design to collaborate over a twenty-week project to conduct research, data analysis, idea generation, and iterative prototyping to create a product, service, or experience that addresses a real need in the community.
Working with our partner Kevin Geiger at the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC), our team of three (Eva Hymes, Christian Hudanich, and myself) investigated how to better support seniors in the Upper Valley as they prepare for, endure, and recover from natural disasters. With climate change increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, seniors face heightened risks due to mobility limitations, health vulnerabilities, and social isolation. We sought to identify effective, accessible strategies that improve disaster preparedness and response for this often-overlooked population.
OUTCOMES
We engaged in both primary and secondary research to better understand the realities of disaster preparedness for rural seniors. We conducted interviews with emergency managers, senior center staff, and emergency personnel to assess the challenges seniors face when seeking information, resources, and support. We surveyed local seniors to ascertain their level of emergency preparedness. We also investigated the effectiveness of existing communication strategies, with a focus on identifying gaps that leave seniors particularly vulnerable.
Based on our insights, we developed a suite of targeted, community-centered solutions including an emergency preparedness BINGO game piloted at the Bugbee Senior Center and a public service announcement (PSA) campaign for local television designed to promote preparedness in a way that is accessible, empowering, and memorable. Throughout, we centered the voices and lived experiences of seniors, ensuring that our recommendations were not only actionable, but genuinely reflective of community needs.
We detailed our design journey and our final products in our project report.
Our team interviewing seniors at the Bugbee Senior Center in Hartford, VT
Us at our final project presentation
IMPACT
As the project manager for our team, I organized our team’s workflow using Gantt charts and weekly checklists to keep research, prototyping, and outreach on schedule. Managing a project of this length — far longer than typical school projects — taught me how to sustain momentum through the setbacks that inevitably arose (such as having to dig Eva’s car out of the snow to drive to a senior center).
I’m most proud of how we helped our community. Out of all the seniors who played our emergency preparedness bingo game that we collected data on, half of them went home and took an additional preparedness action after playing our game. Those individuals are more prepared for an emergency directly as a result of our prototype. We also handed off an emergency preparedness bingo kit with instructions to our partner Kevin at TRORC so that TRORC can conduct more of these games in the future.
Watch our final 12 minute presentation! Our presentation starts at 16:09.
PROCESS
Click on the images below to enlarge them. Click on the "X” in the top right corner to close out of them.
Process photos from our report
Take a look at our final report for a full breakdown of our research and prototyping