The purpose of the study is to understand how to better design a provocative financial planning toolkit that aims to 1. build trust and empathy between financial advisors (service providers) and clients (service recipients) and 2. facilitate constructive and meaningful conversations around the ambiguity and complexity in longevity planning. We conducted four rounds of 60-minute co-creation workshops with eight participants from various design disciplines to work in pairs to generate four concepts and documented their interactions, covering verbal and non-verbal behaviors.
In the study, we focused on behavioral observation and followed the modified conversation-analytic talk-in-interaction research approach—applied video ethnography (Higginbotham & Engelke, 2013; Enfield & Levinson, 2006; Pink, 2004) to 1. capture participants’ behaviors, 2. analyze non-verbal interactions, and 3. represent the insights. The study concludes with five learnings: 1. The intention of collaboration can be projected through body language including gesturing with hands, palms, fingers, arms, and upper bodies. 2. Paper (and other prototyping material) is an accessible, tangible, and shareable medium of collaboration to shape ideas collectively at a relatively low cost. 3. Participants use eye contact to transmit their selfconfidence, exchange ideas, and read their collaborator’s eye contact and facial expressions to receive their feedback, concerns, and thoughts. 4. Participants’ tone of voice is not only about content discussion but also emotional expression. 5. The need to create a better shared co-creation desktop space naturally emerged between the two participants.