Dania Khan

Covo

Service Design

2026

Team Description:Leena Karim - Opportunity Framing, Experience Concept & Interaction DesignUsman Khawaja - Design Research, Information Design & Spatial Navigation, logo designDania Khan - Project Strategy, Design Criteria & User Experience Design, logo designMark Miranda- Design Insights, Concept Development & Virtual Content SystemsCovo is a two-phase service design project that reimagines eldercare as a platform for living rather than a system of managed decline. In Phase One, the team developed Covo as an AI-powered co-living platform framed deliberately as "a dating app meets Airbnb for elderly care" that matches seniors to compatible housemates, connects them to healthcare providers, and enables community governance through a co-op ownership model, all while preserving the autonomy and dignity that institutional care strips away. Phase Two extended this into a Richly Augmented Future enterprise by designing a virtual layer that mirrors the physical community anchored by the Covo Glasses, a wearable AR device that projects a spatial heads-up display into the resident's field of vision, surfacing four tokenized objects (Vitality, Atmosphere, Co-op Tile, and Social Nudge) that represent the resident's health, community energy, ownership stake, and nearby connection opportunities as felt ambient signals rather than clinical data. The virtual neighbourhood is navigated spatially, using familiar architectural metaphors — a front door, a hallway, a communal garden — and underpinned by a social gravity system that quietly draws compatible residents, care providers, and neighbours toward each other using UX principles from Fitts's Law, the Von Restorff Effect, and Hick's Law, creating connection without ever announcing that it is doing so.

“Covo began with a question that the eldercare industry has never genuinely answered: what if aging was designed around the person rather than around the facility? The project's central argument is that loneliness, loss of autonomy, and institutional displacement are not inevitable features of growing old, they are design failures, and design can fix them. The Airbnb disruption parallel is not rhetorical decoration; it is the strategic logic of the entire system. Just as Airbnb made the hotel room feel beside the point by offering a life inside a home, Covo makes the retirement home feel beside the point by offering a life inside a community; first physically, then extended virtually through technology that recedes into the background rather than announcing itself. ”