Supporting memory and identity in older people: findings from a ‘Sandpit’ process

Identity in old age is challenged by physical changes, evolving roles within the family, and life transitions such as retirement. Supporting identity is therefore important in later life, and might be assisted by media technologies which allow people to reflect on their lives, record their personal histories and share these with family, friends and caregivers. This possibility was explored in two creative ‘Sandpits’ with older people as part of the SUS-IT project, funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing programme in the UK. Discussions were held with PC and non-PC user groups of retirement age to understand memory and identity practices and elicit reactions to three novel product concepts. These included a Reminiscing Radio for life review, a Story Lamp for associating spoken stories with photographs and memorabilia, and a pair of virtual reality Travel Glasses for transporting you back to a special place in the past. The main findings of these discussions will be presented, along with concepts generated by the participants in a re-design exercise. This paper will also show how the sandpits enabled older people to be involved in the design process by allowing them to shape early design concepts through exploring their own ideas and motivations

Letter from Guest Editors: Introduction to Special Issue: Audience, design, technology and business factors in new media innovation

The print and media industries have been going through significant and prolonged change in recent years due to the digitization of media content. As with many innovations, the earliest phase of change involved a kind of replication of existing services with new technological processes. Hence the replacement of analogue with digital printing machines simply allowed print media to be produced more flexibly and efficiently. This resembled the motorized carriage design of early cars, echoing the horse drawn carriages they were replacing. More recently, print itself is being threatened by screen-displayed content, which can not only reproduce the printed word and image, but go beyond this by packaging multiple pages in a highly portable and convenient e-book form, providing instant access to multiple sources of web-based content, and integrating other media such as sound, video and interactive games. Similar things could be said about the digital broadcasting of radio and TV content, which is now ready for more radical integration with paper and the web. In this special issue, we examine some of the factors involved in new media innovation within this context of media digitization and convergence. In particular, we consider the future of print media in relation to screen-based media, and some possibilities for combining them in different ways. The papers were invited from presentations at the IARIGAI 2015 conference on Advances in Printing and Media Technology in Helsinki from the 6th–9th September last year. Furthermore, four out of the five papers were submissions from members of the EU COST network FP1104 on ‘New possibilities for print and packaging: Combining print and digital’. The non-FP1104 paper was a related keynote paper on digitization and service business model innovation by Viljakainen, Toivonen & Seisto. The COST network is comprised of 140 academic and company members from 29 countries across Europe, and has been meeting for four years to share and generate new research on augmented print and packaging: http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/fps/FP1104. It also held the Paper Evolutions exhibition of new product concepts in the area at the IARIGAI 2015 conference (Seisto et al., 2015). The selected papers are a small window on the discussions of the network regarding the future of paper, and the need to think about its innovation from an interdisciplinary point of view

Developing a responsive and adaptable emergent media curriculum

The field of mass communication is constantly undergoing change and development, and the pace has accelerated with the advent of digital technologies. One challenge educators face is: how do we educate college students not just for today’s careers, but also for lifelong competencies with media? Against this backdrop, the Department of Media and Journalism at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania sought a new curriculum to capitalize on “emergent media,” that is, media that does not fit neatly into established mass communication disciplines such as journalism, telecommunications, public relations, and advertising. Our curriculum is centered around media literacy, skills development, and experiential learning. In this article, we discuss the theoretical backdrop for the curriculum, the structure of the curriculum, and the growth and future directions of our program. Now seven years into this curriculum, our experience can assist other educators in finding ways to make their curricula responsive and adaptable to a rapidly changing media environment

A pragmatics of intimacy

This study examines the ways in which multiple modern communication technologies facilitate, across time and space, the maintenance of a close interpersonal relationship between two best friends. The analysis, which focuses mainly on the openings and closings of the different types of communications, reveals a tendency for the friends to shorten openings and extend closings. However, this is possible only if the friends are fully aware of, and care about, the practical, social and emotional details of each other’s lives during periods of absence. The concomitant linguistic behaviours in their interpersonal interactions could be described as a kind of pragmatics of intimacy which cannot be achieved without the explicit and practical demonstration of that mutual care and concern

From Audio Paper to Next Generation Paper

It has been 24 years since the publication of Wellner’s (1993) digital desk, demonstrating the augmentation of paper documents with projected information. Since then there have been many related developments in computing; including the world wide web, e-book readers, maturation of the augmented reality paradigm, embedded and printed electronics, and the internet of things. In this talk I draw on some of my own design explorations of augmenting paper with sound over the years, to illustrate the value of ‘audiopaper’ but also the way these explorations were rooted in the applications and technology of the day. I show that two key technologies have been important to the implementation of audiopaper over the years, and that the bigger opportunity is in connecting paper to the web. This culminates in a vision for two future generations of paper which communicate and interact with the digital devices around the

The challenge of designing for diversity in older users

Purpose: The older population is not a homogenous group and show significant diversity in constitution, capabilities and experience. In order for new and emerging digital technologies to be inclusive, it is crucial to encompass this diversity and employ a design process that is sensitive to it. Current approaches to inclusive design tend to seek one design for all, focusing on users who are least engaged with digital technology. In this paper we outline an alternative approach to inclusive design based on co-design with both digitally engaged and unengaged user groups. In our study, as part of a multi-disciplinary group in the New Dynamics of Ageing (UK) funded collaborative research project, older people from different walks of life were invited to four different themed workshops called ‘sandpits’ to explore current and emerging technologies in a playful and creative context to help them envisage the potential implications these technologies can have in their lives as well as to identify key issues and user requirements for further development. This paper will discuss the outcome from three of those sandpits. The themes explored in these three sandpits were 1) Custom computers for older people 2) Supporting Identity and memory in later life and 3) Social connections with new technology. Methods. A total of 66 older people participated in the three sandpits conducted between 2009 and 2010. Separated into PC and non-PC users groups, they were involved in discussions and shown open ambiguous envisionments that responded to the themes through hands-on demonstration, role-play or dramatic enactment of their use. Broadly taking into account the role of technology generations effects, the envisionments were modeled and presented as appliances, incorporating forms of products and interactions that older people are familiar with to encourage in-clusion. The older participants were then involved in the redesign of these envisionments through a collaborative design process. Results and discussion The design responses from older PC and non-PC user groups revealed a difference in the type of embodiment they want for Internet-enabled applications. Both groups redesigned the concepts based on their experience, interests, familiarity with the technology they have and its associated infrastructure or lack thereof. In general, non-PC user groups preferred the appliance nature of the envisionments, and incorporated the functions they were interested in performing, such as capturing spoken stories, sharing photographs, chatting over TV programmes, etc into these appliances. In contrast, PC owners questioned the need for separate appliances and often re-designed them as PC applications or Internet services with emphasis placed on modality and compatibility with their existing infrastructure. The paper will discuss the difficulty and challenge of bridging the gap between the diversity of technology and its users

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TECHNOLY RE-INVENTION FOR AN OLDER MARKET

Older people can often fall on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide’ in terms of accessing and enjoying new digital technology. One approach to this issue is to provide training programmes and customisation techniques for using existing technology. However, another is to re-invent technology with and for older people themselves. In this paper, I propose four recommendations for re-invention, and illustrate these with examples in the domain of digital photography