The relation between diabetes and loneliness,

And how we tried to alleviate some of that loneliness

This case study was done for a school project. It also happens to be one of the favourite projects I have participated in. 

Background:

This project was done for the course of service design. In this course, we are expected to create a service for a self chosen target audience. The goal was not to focus on the technical aspect of it all but on the research side of it.

Originally, the project started out with the idea of creating a service for people who go on holiday alone. However, we had to abandon this because we couldn’t get the desired data. This was due to two things, we were in the midst of a pandemic, and we didn’t really know people who went on holiday alone. So we changed the subject and thought to our selves. What is interesting and don’t we really know a lot about? We ended up with diabetics, we figured that seeing as they were especially vulnerable during the pandemic. It would be fascinating to learn more about them.

My Role

I had a variety of roles during this project. They were mainly focused on research, documenting and presenting the final project. Breaking down my roles during this project would look like this:

Research:

I had conducted desk research into the subject group. Finding out the difference between the forms of diabetes, as well as looking at the amount of people that have diabetes in the Netherlands. I generated the hypothesis for the project.

Creating:

Together with a teammate, we designed and built the interview schedule. However, to be able to actually gather good enough data, we opted for a survey. I was in charge of translating in English and create the survey in General.

The project:

Project – Overview

The target audience for this project were: Diabetics between the age of 18 to 40.

Some quick background information. What is diabetes type 1? Diabetes type 1 is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Insulin is a hormone needed to allow sugar (glucose) to enter cells to produce energy. The general “fix” is to supply insulin to yourself throughout the whole day, in relation to the food you consume.

I have broken the different facets of this project down into 5 different steps. Below are the different steps, of the projects.

Step 1 – Hypothesis Generation

  • Diabetes is a task that is imposed on you, as a small child this is not so much of a problem, but as you get older it becomes more and more difficult of a task.
  • The (social) help-structure they built around their diabetes – the measures and the tools – have largely disappeared. As a result, the infrastructure has been somewhat crippled, as it’s not built for an emergency/pandemic like this. Coping strategies are built on something out of your control (diabetes), but not built to keep working during extreme world situations.
  • You experience more feelings of misunderstanding.
  • Part of the problem is to create awareness to the condition. Explaining how and why.

Step 2 – The survey:

Whilst creating the survey, we started to think about how could we actually get the respondents we need? We came to the conclusion they should do something cheeky. So we went on Facebook and joined a variety of Diabetic Facebook pages. In some of them we got the go ahead from the mods to post the survey and the other we just posted. A bit of guerilla marketing, so to speak. We even posted our survey on Reddit, but as soon as it was up it was taken down, However it does make a good story.

As seen on the picture below, we had a huge amount of Respondents. We were absolutely blown back by the amount of response we got of the survey. Because we didn’t want to exclude English-speaking respondents, I translated the survey into English.

Step 3 – The interviews

From the interviews, we got four things that really stuck out to us.

These were:

  • “Being a diabetic automatically means having an eating disorder. Sometimes our whole lives revolve around food.”
  • “Public opinion on diabetes is not something you can easily work with, there is a lot of misunderstanding and bad advice with good intentions.”
  • “People blame me personally for being sick or being a diabetic, it’s not my intention, but it really gets in the way of living my life.”
  • “I would love to, just one day, deal with a little less stress about my insulin-level and overall planning of my entire day.”

Step 4 – The concept

Our main insight was that most of the loneliness for diabetics comes from the fact
that they feel left out. Having diabetes is a day job on itself and just a single gram
of sugar can flip your whole day around.

This means that going out for diner with friends or family is not something that
diabetics do very often. Since eating at home is so much easier – you can check
the carbohydrates and sugars – diabetics often retreat to eating alone or at home.
Going out for dinner is a very social gathering, think about how many times you’ve
been out for dinner before corona. And yes, even a ‘kroketje’ from the FEBO is a
privilege you have as a non-diabetic.

With just a tiny tweak to a restaurants’ menu, diabetics are now freed from concern
over what they are eating.

Step 5 – The end result:

This is the front of the menu, which just looks like “a normal” menu.

And this is the back of the menu, where we have subtly displayed the amount of calories each item of the menu has. The idea is that this can be “casually” looked at.