Voicing values: Laying foundations for ageing people to participate in design

© 2016 ACM. This paper discusses Participatory Design workshops that sought to enable ageing people to articulate their core values in relation to their experiences of ageing. Our motivations were to better understand how ageing people decide whether or not to adopt and use particular technologies, and to gain insights into the kinds of technologies that might support their aspirations as they age. We contribute to current understandings of ageing people's values, including a range of values that were most important to our participants, insights into how these values are expressed and experienced in everyday lives, the interrelatedness of values in action, and how the three social dimensions of self, friends and family, as well as community influence the expression of values. The workshops demonstrated how engaged ageing people are with others and the broader communities they inhabit. We reflect on the processes, methods and tools that were useful when supporting people to voice their values and how this approach can support the participation of ageing people in design

Values-led Participatory Design as a pursuit of meaningful alternatives

Copyright © 2015 ACM. Participatory Design (PD) is inherently concerned with inquiring into and supporting human values when designing IT. We argue that a PD approach that is led by a focus upon participants' values can allow participants to discover meaningful alternatives - alternative uses and alternative conceptualizations for IT that are particularly meaningful to them. However, how PD works with values in the design process has not been made explicit. In this paper, we aim to (i) explicate this values-led PD approach, (ii) illustrate how this approach can lead to outcomes that are meaningful alternatives, and (iii) explain the nature of meaningful alternatives. We use a PD case study to illustrate how we work with participants in a values-led PD approach towards meaningful alternatives

Positive Ageing: Elements and factors for design

Copyright © 2015 ACM. A significant number of models and frameworks have introduced, and been used to support, positive approaches to ageing. They include Successful Ageing, Active Ageing and Ageing in Place, among others. The number of models can create confusion for technology designers who wish to incorporate such models into practice. This paper reviews different models of positive ageing in order to distil a comprehensive list of elements and factors that are important to, and supportive of, positive ageing. This list offers designers a useful source for considering the design of technology to support positive ageing. Finally, we discuss some gaps found in existing models and offer some insights into how designers could use this paper as a resource for design

Mutual learning as a resource for research design

Copyright 2014 ACM. Mutual learning processes provide the context for this paper. We reflect on the early research design process of an ongoing project that is investigating the potential contributions of the Internet of Things (IoT) to ageing well. While mutual learning is assumed and embedded in Participatory Design tools and methods, it was only when we explicitly used mutual learning processes, as a resource in the research design of the project, that we could make clear and accountable decisions about how to proceed. The paper ends with a reaffirmation of the importance of mutual learning processes in Participatory Design, noting the opportunities, even imperatives, for foregrounding mutual learning processes in the design of IoT applications

Tactics for Designing Probes to Explore Parents' Differing Perspectives on Family Technology Use

Experiences of technology use in everyday family life can be complex. In particular, tensions can arise when parents have differing perspectives on their family's technology use. This paper describes design tactics we used to create a probe collection that successfully supported explorations of these differing perspectives, and to uncover the tensions involved whilst remaining sensitive to any existing conflict. The tactics created opportunities for conversation between parents and to shift their individual perspectives. These tactics helped to raise the awareness sets of parents' had of each other's perspectives on their family's technology use. Unexpected insights emerged that even surprised our participants, when they were asked to invert their point of view to imagine how their technologies might experience domestic life. Furthermore, deeper insights emerged when participants' responses to individual probes were viewed together, as a collection

Experiential Persona: Towards Supporting Richer and Unfinalized Representations of People

The Persona, as a 2D poster, is a commonly created and used tool in user-centred design activities. Whilst popular, many in HCI have critiqued its depictions of g€the user' as reductive, shallow, and static. Yet, there are not many alternatives. In this late-breaking work, we present our efforts to imagine and create an alternative to this 2D persona - one that consists of a carefully curated, staged collection of artifacts. We call this an Experiential Persona because it allows designers to interact with and explore the artifacts, individually and as a collection, to imagine and experience the world of g€the user'. This more embodied, interactive and open-ended persona can potentially support richer sense making; encouraging a more open, emergent, and unfinalized view of people we design for. This study contributes to extending design tools, and exploring novel use of tangible artifacts to support design, as well as a way to represent design knowledge

Designing the social Internet of Things

Copyright © 2017 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM). What role do people have in the Internet of Things? Compared to the impressive body of research that is currently tackling the technical issues of the Internet of Things, social aspects of agency, engagement, participation, and ethics, are receiving less attention. The goal of this 'Designing the Social Internet of Things' workshop is to contribute by shedding light on these aspects. We invite prospective participants to take a humanistic standpoint, explore people's relations with 'things' first, and then build on such relations so as to support socially relevant goals of engagement, relatedness, participation, and creativity

Responses to environmental enrichment differ with sex and genotype in a transgenic mouse model of Huntington's disease.

BACKGROUND: Environmental enrichment (EE) in laboratory animals improves neurological function and motor/cognitive performance, and is proposed as a strategy for treating neurodegenerative diseases. EE has been investigated in the R6/2 mouse model of Huntington's disease (HD), where increased social interaction, sensory stimulation, exploration, and physical activity improved survival. We have also shown previously that HD patients and R6/2 mice have disrupted circadian rhythms, treatment of which may improve cognition, general health, and survival. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We examined the effects of EE on the behavioral phenotype and circadian activity of R6/2 mice. Our mice are typically housed in an "enriched" environment, so the EE that the mice received was in addition to these enhanced housing conditions. Mice were either kept in their home cages or exposed daily to the EE (a large playground box containing running wheels and other toys). The "home cage" and "playground" groups were subdivided into "handling" (stimulated throughout the experimental period) and "no-handling" groups. All mice were assessed for survival, body weight, and cognitive performance in the Morris water maze (MWM). Mice in the playground groups were more active throughout the enrichment period than home cage mice. Furthermore, R6/2 mice in the EE/no-handling groups had better survival than those in the home cage/no-handling groups. Sex differences were seen in response to EE. Handling was detrimental to R6/2 female mice, but EE increased the body weight of male R6/2 and WT mice in the handling group. EE combined with handling significantly improved MWM performance in female, but not male, R6/2 mice. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We show that even when mice are living in an enriched home cage, further EE had beneficial effects. However, the improvements in cognition and survival vary with sex and genotype. These results indicate that EE may improve the quality of life of HD patients, but we suggest that EE as a therapy should be tailored to individuals