Ageing Futures: Towards Cognitively Inclusive Digital Media Products

This thesis is situated in a moment when the theory and practice of inclusive design appears to be significantly implicated in the social and economic response to demographic changes in Western Europe by addressing the need to reconnect older people with technology. In light of claims that cognitive ageing results in an increasing disconnection from novel digital media in old age, inclusive design is apparently trapped in a discourse in which digital media products and interfaces are designed as a response to a deterministic decline in abilities. The thesis proceeds from this context to ask what intellectual moves are required within the discourses of inclusive design so that its community of theorists and practitioners can both comprehend and afford the enaction of cognitive experience in old age? Whilst influential design scholarship actively disregards reductionist cognitive explanations of human and technological relationships, it appears that inclusive design still requires an explanation of temporal changes to human cognition in later life. Whilst there is a burgeoning area of design related research dealing with this issue—an area this thesis defines as ‘cognitively inclusive design’—the underlying assumptions and claims supporting this body of research suggests its theorists and practitioners are struggling to move beyond conceptualising older people as passive consumers suffering a deterioration in key cognitive abilities. The thesis argues that, by revisiting the cognitive sciences for alternative explanations for the basis of human cognition, it is possible to relieve this problem by opening up new spaces for designers to critically reflect upon the manner in which older people interact with digital media. In taking a position that design is required to support human cognitive enactment, the thesis develops a new approach to conceptualising temporal changes in human cognition, defined as ‘senescent cognition’. From this new critical lens, the thesis provides an alternative ‘senescentechnic’ explanation of cognitive disconnections between older people and digital media that eschews reductionism and moves beyond a deterministic process of deterioration. In reassessing what ageing cognition means, new strategies for the future of inclusive design are proposed that emphasise the role of creating space for older people to actively explore, reflect upon and enact their own cognitive couplings with technology.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Making at the Margins: Making in an Under-resourced e-Waste Recycling Centre

HCI1and CSCW literature has extensively studied a wide variety of maker cultures. In this paper, we focus on understanding what making is like for people and communities who do not have access to advanced technological infrastructures. We report on six-month-long ethnographic fieldwork at a non-profit, resource-constrained, e-waste recycling centre that engages members from a low socioeconomic status (SES) community in making activities. Our findings show that making in such a setting is shaped by local economic and social factors in a resource-constrained environment and highlight how this community engages in a wide range of making activities. In describing these making activities, we emphasize how making was conducted to purposely enable ongoing and future making by others; promoted the wellbeing and skill development of centre members; and was socially-engaged to address concerns in the local community. We conclude by discussing how such type of making contributes a new understanding of maker culture, one that is appreciative of resource-constraints, integrates different sources of value, and is embedded in local place

Technology and the Politics of Mobility: Evidence Generation in Accessible Transport Activism

Digital technologies offer the possibility of community empowerment via the reconfiguration of public services. This potential relies on actively involved citizens engaging with decision makers to pursue civic goals. In this paper we study one such group of involved citizens, examining the evidencing practices of a rare disease charity campaigning for accessible public transport. Through fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the ways in which staff and volunteers assembled and presented different forms of evidence, in doing so reframing what is conceived as 'valid knowledge'. We note the challenges this group faced in capturing experiential knowledge around the accessibility barriers of public transport, and the trade-offs that are made when presenting evidence to policy and decision makers. We offer a number of design considerations for future HCI research, focusing on how digital technology might be configured more appropriately to support campaigning around the politics of mobility

Exploring digital support for the student transition to university through questionable concepts

New students face challenges when they make the transition from school to university. Existing digital technologies used during this transition can sometimes increase the stressors associated with change. In order to explore ways forward for technology design in this space, we developed a brochure of questionable concepts. The concepts were grounded in findings of our prior research, yet were also intended to act as provocations to promote discussion in workshops involving 32 first year university students. Our analysis of workshop discussions documents the diverse issues students face around social bonding, their home environment, and their academic performance. Our findings challenge assumptions made in prior work about the ease of transition to university. We demonstrate how questionable concepts can play an important role in prompting ‘safe’ conversations around stressful life events for adolescents

Managing Multiple Identities to Combat Stigmatisation in the Digital Age

It has long been identified that people consciously curate, manage and maintain multiple online individual identities based on characteristics such as race, gender, and societal status; research has also established that people may choose to emphasise one such identity other another as a means to avoid stigmatisation, discrimination and stereotyping. The rise of online state, corporate, and peer surveillance however threatens to disrupt this process by modelling, categorising and restraining identity to that which has been surveilled. We posit that new anti-surveillance tactics may emerge that allow users the freedom to manage and switch their identities in ways that seek to maintain social justice and counteract discrimination

Exploring delegate engagement with an augmented conference

We describe a qualitative study of delegate engagement with technology in academic conferences through a large- scale deployment of prototype technologies. These deployments represent current themes in conference technologies, such as providing access to content and opportunities for socialising between delegates. We consider not just the use of individual technologies, but also the overall impact of an assemblage of interfaces, ranging from ambient to interactive and mobile to situated. Based on a two-week deployment followed by interviews and surveys of attendees, we discuss the ways in which delegates engaged with the prototypes and the implications this had for their experience of the conferences. From our findings, we draw three new themes to inform the development of future conference technologies

Accountable: Exploring the Inadequacies of Transparent Financial Practice in the Non-Profit Sector

Increasingly, governments and organisations publish data on expenditure and finance as 'open' data in order to be more transparent to the public in how funding is spent. Accountable is a web-based tool that visualises and relates open financial data provided by local government and non-profit organisations (NPOs) in the UK. A qualitative study was conducted where Accountable was treated as a technology probe, and used by representatives of NPOs and members of the public who invest their time or effort voluntarily into such organisations. The study highlighted how: current open data sets provided by public bodies are inadequate in their representation of funding structures; the focus on finance and fiscal expenditure in such data makes invisible the in-kind effort of volunteers and the wider beneficiaries of an organisation's work; and problems arising from the interoperability of open data technologies. The paper concludes with implications for the design of future systems, considering the domains of transparency and accountability in relation to the findings

Authors’ Response: Balancing Openness and Structure in Conference Design to Support a Burgeoning Research Community

We focus on the following issues: our intentions behind establishing the new Research Through Design conference series; epistemological concerns around "research through design"; and how we might find a balance between openness and specificity for the conference series going forward

Creative and collaborative reflective thinking to support policy deliberation and decision making

Background: Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction. Aims and objectives: We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers’ practices, and how these may influence conventional policy design processes. Methods: This paper reports on the learnings from a two-month participant observation at UK Policy Lab conducted in early 2019. Findings: We found that, beyond human-centred and future-oriented practices, the designers working at this unit appropriate design as a reflective practice for the context of policymaking. We discuss how the use of visual and creative methods of design are utilised by policy designers to facilitate co-creative reflective practices, and how these make a valuable contribution to policymaking practices in UK Government. Discussion and conclusions: As deliberation and decision making is influenced both by what is thought about as well as who is doing the thinking, reflective practices allow notions and assumptions to be unpicked. Moreover, when done as a group activity, reflection leads to a co-production of a deepened understanding of policy challenges.Consequently, we argue, the reflective practices introduced by Policy Lab are an essential contribution to developing a co-creation tradition in evidence-informed policymaking processes Key messages Beyond human-centred and future-oriented methods, UK Policy Lab appropriates design as a reflective practice, to contribute to policymaking by supporting deliberation and decision making. Creative and visual methods from design enable collaborative policymaking processes, as they externalise thinking and surface overlaps and differences among policymakers’ perspectives. We argue that design can support the reflective practice of policymakers, highlighting explicit and implicit frames structuring decision making