NFSA – Helping seniors reconnect with Australian pastimes

The NFSA is one of Australia’s most engaging places for encounters with our memories, stories and imagination. As part of the NFSA’s vision to be smart, connected and open, we ran a design process to develop a digital platform that promotes public interaction with the collection. We developed a Trivia Game as an exciting and engaging way to immerse audiences in the recorded sounds and moving images etched in our memories. A unique opportunity emerged to tailor the product to aged care residents to reach an audience with high barriers to access and build social connectedness through film and sound.

Following an initial design process for the broader public, we tailored an experience for aged care residents and facilities through user research, prototyping and product development. This provided insights into the value proposition for aged care residents and providers. It demonstrated a high level of desire, however, revealed opportunities to prioritise social cohesion and ‘memory cascades’ over competitiveness. It also identified necessary improvements to accessibility and content management. The product is now being piloted in aged care facilities and delivering on the desired social outcomes. The NFSA is currently exploring opportunities to extend the Trivia Game to new audiences.

Social impact: Residents reported a sense of joy, achievement and self-esteem in recalling memories and shared experiences. The key impacts relate to social connectedness and therapeutic benefits. Commercial impact: The game proved to be a natural fit into nursing home social calendars. It caters to small lifestyle activity budgets, but provides a unique value proposition for providers around the NFSA’s unique content and the tailored design elements. Business value: The game has opened up the archive’s rich collection to new audiences, and provided an opportunity to tailor and scale the product with new partners such as schools and cultural institutions.

This project has created real and tangible change in a product that has the potential to touch and engage Australians nationwide. Some of the key features and benefits include: Multiple games can be played simultaneously in different locations nationwide. Enables engagement regardless of digital capability or physical mobility by allowing participants to play in person on or off the device or on mobile in different locations. The experiences uses a sequence of pre-roll content, multiple-choice questions, answers revealed with content to promote participant engagement with all content types and provide progression paths irrespective of content knowledge. Syncthing content management system allows all games to reference one content library but specify different items within that library, this means individual games are appropriately tailored to the audience. Games can be set up with controls to dictate question types, numbers, timings and content types, player numbers and location settings to meet different audience attention spans and capabilities. Used with any SmartTV or TV with USB, USBC or HDMI input. Content is limited to specific file sizes for video, image and sound to eliminate content streaming issues in gameplay and minimise required bandwidth to run the game (critical for aged care facilities).