The System Assumed You Already Knew How to Use It

Week 1 — This blog documents the development of my Final Major Project for the MA Service Design course at LCC, UAL.

Almost 6 million people aged 65 and over in the UK either can’t use the internet safely or aren’t online at all (Age UK, 2024). On the tube back from Heathrow, I sat across from an older woman. Sharp eyes, good posture, fully present. In her hand was a small keypad phone. No smartphone. Her granddaughter had come to the airport to collect her, not out of love alone, but necessity. She couldn’t manage the journey back by herself anymore. She used to, she told me that much. The network hadn’t made itself harder to use in any obvious way. Nobody announced it. The ticket offices just quietly closed. The apps arrived. The assumption set in that everyone had a device, a data plan, a contactless card, and enough confidence in all three to get from A to B alone. And somewhere in that shift, a woman who was perfectly capable became someone who needed escorting.

That moment became Canvas 1.

The task for Week 1 was to develop three research canvases, three possible directions for the Final Major Project. I came in with transport and digital exclusion, digital life after death, and loneliness before it becomes a crisis. Three real problems. Three directions I couldn’t fully commit to yet.

The second canvas came from a different kind of discomfort. I lost someone recently. And in the middle of everything that comes with that, my family was suddenly faced with decisions nobody had prepared us for. His phone. His accounts. Subscriptions still charging. Doctors calling to confirm appointments. We didn’t know what to do with any of it, and nobody told us there was a right way. There isn’t one. Nothing has been designed for this moment. Half of bereaved families in the UK say they felt inadequately informed throughout the probate process. People improvise. Some post death announcements from the deceased person’s own WhatsApp because no other option exists. It’s one of the most vulnerable moments in a person’s life and it has barely been designed for.

The third was about loneliness, but not the kind that gets talked about. Not the elderly neighbour nobody checks on. The 27-year-old who moved to London for a job, comes home to an empty flat every night, isn’t in crisis, isn’t asking for help, but is just quietly disappearing. People aged 16 to 29 are more than twice as likely to report feeling lonely often or always than those over 70. Nothing in the health system is designed to reach someone at that stage. By the time services engage, it’s already clinical.

My tutor Hena’s feedback after the session was to focus. Decide whether the canvases are connected or separate.

To find the gap, not just the problem.

I’ve been sitting with that since. And the honest answer is that Canvas 1 keeps pulling harder than the other two. Not because the others aren’t real, they are. But the transport problem has a specific, observable moment of failure. I watched it happen. Almost 6 million people aged 65 and over in the UK either can’t use the internet safely or aren’t online at all. The London Assembly’s own transport committee called TfL’s accessibility efforts “surface level” as recently as early 2026, and yet the network keeps digitising. The gap between what’s being built and who gets left behind is not shrinking. It’s widening.

More than 1 in 3 over 65s (4.7 million) lack the basic skills to use the internet successfully and 1 in 6 (2.3 million) don’t use it at all. Age UK highlights the forgotten ‘digital excluded’ in its new report: Offline and Overlooked

The problem I keep returning to isn’t just that the system is inaccessible. It’s that the people experiencing that inaccessibility are invisible to the people designing it. People who find public transport difficult to use due to age or disability, but don’t qualify for assisted services, remain structurally unseen in transport planning. They’re non-users. And non-users don’t show up in the data.

But here’s the part I can’t resolve yet. TfL is a massive public body. Getting meaningful access to work with them, not just research about them, is genuinely hard. The organisations actually doing this work, London TravelWatch, Transport for All, Age UK, are more reachable but still not obvious partners for a student project with a tight timeline. Without real access to the people experiencing this, and ideally the people making decisions about it, there’s a risk of producing something that sits neatly on paper and changes nothing.

That’s where I’m landing at the end of Week 1. Fairly sure about the direction. Much less sure about the route in.