The harm in conflating aging with accessibility

Including older adults as full stakeholders in digital society. </p

Enhancing engagement and participation of seniors in society with the use of social media - The case of a reflective participatory design method story

An ageing population is an emerging phenomenon in Europe and the rest of the world. Seniors face issues of social isolation and loneliness. Recently the research focus in ICT design has also turned to social media that can sustain seniors’ engagement and participation in social activities even when it is physically a challenge for them to leave home. Design and re-design of social media may support seniors’ engagement and participation in social activities, contributing to mitigate the feeling of loneliness and social isolation. In this paper, the focus is on understanding seniors’ social activities and their relationship to social media which may support their relationship. With Participatory Design – a reflective design approach, we have involved seniors in reflecting on possible future social media that can support and enrich social relationships. The participative methods used are cartographic mapping and future workshop, both appropriate for seniors to get involved in reflecting,thinking and making design alternatives together with other participants. We discuss how is to involve seniors in PD and what we need to know to design better future social media that can support seniors.publishedVersio

Navigating Relationships and Boundaries: Concerns around ICT-uptake for Elderly People

Despite a proliferation of research in the use of ICTs to support active and healthy ageing, few have considered the privacy and security concerns particular to the elderly. We investigated the appropriation of tablet devices and a neighborhood portal as well as emerging privacy and security issues through ethnographic and action research in a long-term participatory design (PD) project with elderly participants. We discuss two major themes: a) the tensions related to perceived digital threats and the social pressures of online disclosure to the social environment; and b) the relation of these issues to the ICT appropriation process and the referring challenges we encountered. We argue that there is a need to understand the interleaving of physical and virtual habitats, the various ways resulting in discomfort and the senior citizens' actions – which at first glance appear contradictory. We consider the implications of the issues observed for examining privacy and security concerns more broadly as well as discussing implications for the design of the portal and the shaping of social measures for appropriation support

Co-designing age-friendly neighborhood spaces in Copenhagen: Starting with an age-friendly co-design process

Age-friendly cities and communities are currently attracting much attention as the ageing population becomes a larger proportion of our societies and their needs and aspirations become more diverse, which needs to be reflected in our cities. This calls for older people to play an active role in the design of suitable environments, e.g., by being involved in the design process. With this paper, we present a study where the methodology of co-design was used to engage 100+ older people in a low-income neighborhood in Copenhagen in designing new neighborhood spaces to reflect their needs and wishes. By focusing on the co-design process, and not the design solution, we investigate and present insights across the entire span of the process—from recruitment to implementation—and seek to extract particular elements that contribute to the age friendliness of the process. Recommendations for future co-design processes with older people include focusing on explicit communication and foreseeable steps to create a process that offers multiple and flexible participation options and to upgrade the latter stages of the co-design process through scale 1:1 prototyping and implementation. The findings contribute to both the professional practice of co-designing with older people on a spatial scale, as well as to policy makers and practice stakeholders when initiating initiatives with age-friendly cities and communities

Designing for Prolonged Mastery. On involving old people in Participatory Design

In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we organized and carried out the process so that our users could participate in the mutual learning and co-construction activities on their own terms. When organizing the process we had to take into account the limited capacity for design participation of our users but also build on the capacities they have. The paper describes our PD approach and what we did to facilitate participation from our old users, emphasizing recruiting, timing, continuity, representativity, and immediacy. The paper also discusses which design decisions the users participated in and how they influenced the design result. We analyse how they brought in design possibilities (choices), selected, concretized and evaluated them, and also how the final design result bears traces of their participation

Examining Interdependencies and Constraints in Co-Creation

This paper reports on the first year of a three-year-long cocreation project with older adults. We focus our analysis on one particular workshop in which participants stopped designing and began to think about promoting the app we were co-creating. The workshop proved uniquely important for examining assumptions we had made about how and why the co-creation process would be successful. This paper concedes flaws in these assumptions and in the execution of the methodology as a way of illuminating dynamics that act on research projects in ways that are antithetical to effective co-creation. Reporting on the unexpected results of our participant engagements, we reveal new insights into the challenges in executing co-creation methodology

Older Adults’ Deployment of ‘Distrust’

Older adults frequently deploy the concept of distrust when discussing digital technologies, and it is tempting to assume that distrust is largely responsible for the reduced uptake by older adults witnessed in the latest surveys of technology use. To help understand the impact of distrust on adoption behavior, we conducted focus groups with older adults exploring how, in what circumstances, and to what effect older adults articulate distrust in digital technologies. Our findings indicate that distrust is not especially relevant to older adults’ practical decision making around technology (non-)use. The older adults in our study used the language of distrust to open up discussions around digital technologies to larger issues related to values. This suggests that looking to distrust as a predictor of non-use (e.g. in Technology Acceptance Model studies) may be uniquely unhelpful in the case of older adults, as it narrows the discussion of technology acceptance and trust to interactional issues, when their use of distrust pertains to much wider concerns. Likewise, technology adoption should not be viewed as indicative of trust or an endorsement of technology acceptability. Older adults using-while-distrusting offers important insights into how to design truly acceptable digital technologies