The Mutual Shaping of Ageing & Technology: Situating design research
As part of my PhD design research, exploring social engagement for older people towards healthy ageing in aged communities, I want to discuss some emerging themes and the implications for designer and research practitioners.
Contemporary research and efforts exploring ageing towards health and wellbeing cannot explore this space without identifying, discussing, or highlighting the current or impending impact of emerging technologies on the experience of later life. However, in doing so, many either place too much belief on its capacity to change the lives of older people, or heavily discount the benefits or adoption-ability of technology by this cohort.
As I am finding, the implications of technology with and for older people is more complicated and nuanced than either of these perspectives propose. As such, one theme and underlying notion I want to explore, which literature is beginning to articulate, is how later life and our devices, computers and robotics are driving and forming each other.
In this piece, I bring to light some of the developing discourse around both these observations of ageing with technology, and how design can re-contextualize its place and role in curating such relations. Importantly, this reflects on the work of self-proclaimed Socio-gerontechnologists, emerging in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and how their perceptions of design’s place can help future design practitioners explore their work in this field.
Causality and confluence in the future of ageing
First, let me scope out the work of these socio-gerontechnologists and their emerging model of the co-constitution of ageing and technology (CAT). This refers to a recent publication from Alexander Peine and Louis Neven (2020), concerning a model and agenda for CAT. Building on both their own work in this space and encapsulating the ‘grand challenge’ ageing, these researchers are pushing for the co-creation of digital environments to engage in and traverse ageing healthily.
This has been led by Kelly Joyce & Meika Loe (2010, 2017) through a sociological approach of increasingly positioning older people as Technogenarians: older people which adapt technological artifacts to suit their needs, rather than be passive consumers. This reflects both the importance of older people ‘domesticating’ their devices, objects, and artefacts, and a lack of learning, focus or understanding from industry of these needs.
Peine & Neven’s CAT-model explores how these mechanisms work at present, how they support engaging across different worlds of understandings, and can lead to problematic and systematic assumptions. From a more traditional, designerly perspective, the practitioner is situated and remains in the Design Worlds, collecting Images of Ageing into collages of meaning, towards developing, and pushing Technological Artifacts out in the wild of the Life Worlds of Older People.
The flow of information, data and value illustrated by the diagram’s arrows are steadfast, restrictive, and directional. This captures present notions around how data and meaning is unable to flow freely across the worlds of Older People and Design, instead mitigated and defined in their relations by assumed images and probing artifacts. Approaches formed in ethnographic, participatory and agile methodologies are some explains of ways to re-align the flow of this information and value, and lead to more inclusion and empathetic engagement.
Shirlee Sharkey and her colleagues from Canadian-based SE Health, have articulated this in their text The Future of Aging, where the input of older people and collaboration with them can lead to both understanding what drives them to want or need integrate technologies, and provide opportunities for adding artistry and craftsmanship (personalization and customization) in how we make with them.
Not unlike wider society, older people do want to both personalize their things and for opportunities to customize and domesticate their products and environments. Doing so enables these things to become used artifacts of meaning and connection, or places of living, learning, and changing. Yet the evidence suggests that technologies are failing to enable or become such artifacts in places, having adequacy and suitability challenges when dealing with the complexities of everyday life.
As I explore in my own research the social engagement of older people via mobile and digital technologies, I have to question with older people their interests, hobbies, concerns, and needs, to build truer representations, not just images of people. Where design ethnography begins capture these sentiments, approaches such as Cultural Safety can help become responsive to cultural differences and the impacts of conscious and unconscious discrimination which leads to constructed images —the representation of something through processed data.
Identifying the beliefs, systems, rituals, and routines for ageing populations, sees that technology and ageing do shape each other, but perhaps not in an informed and equitable sense. STS, Human-computer Interaction and Design studies have found benefit and effectiveness in approaching intervention and investigation through models not dissimilar CAT, and using methods such as co-design or co-creation, design ethnography and design fiction. As these fields look to benefit and support ageing now and into the future, we need to become reflective on our designerly and researcher notions, ways, tools, and perspectives.
Practicing Design with the Forgotten
In exploring design anthropology and ethnographic methods for research, Miriam Pastor’s Designing for the forgotten was a piece which both cemented in me a need to reflect on my work as a practitioner, and put emphasis on using better ways to work with older people, particularly in aged care facilities. From first establishing the existing relations and model for the ageing and technology, I now want to begin to re-consider how the design and later life worlds engage with each other.
Pastor articulates that design has moved from somewhat fashionistic and aesthetic-centric to increasingly human-centred endeavor which asserts itself responsible for shaping the future of everything. In countering this belief in design which has lead to design thinking and co-design everything, She outlays several points which I want to discuss in the context of designing and researching with older people in aged care:
Design is not for everyone
In practice, we design for some people, as we choose who to and not to design for. If we attempt to design for all, we will leave people behind and these out-of-the-frame population are what Pastor identifies as “the forgotten.” So when exploring ageing and technology, even with a small cohort such as older people at an aged care facility, the forgotten still endures.
These may be those with cognitive or physical impairment, not capable of what the designer may assume to be appropriate, or perhaps the culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) who might not be so easily identified by the scope of many designer’s discovery or definitions. Within my own investigation, i’ve also been mindful of those engaging or supporting older people, such as carers in aged care or home care, as well as family and friends or even wider community members which engage with them.
For many designers this might be interpreted as undertaking stakeholder analysis and mapping individuals or groups based on their power and interest. But again, this enable the designer to produce their images based on their own assumptions and intuitions, without consulting or exploring the realities, perception of others or in collaboration. Larissa Hjorth and colleagues instead prefer to realise that doing interdisciplinary collaborative research is hard. In their guide for Creative Practice Ethnographies (2019), they see that design methods are not just about engaging but empowering the research and research participants, towards alternative forms of knowledge exchange and transfer.
Design as a new form of colonialism
This speaks to the greater understanding that in bringing design tools, skills, understandings and concepts into environments not aware or using them, we essentially extend our authority over other people, imposing subscriptive doctrine. Research is not immune to this, nor the health sector, where those exploring Research in the Real World are being held to the expectation and requirements of randomized controlled trials. With older people most prominently, putting them through such intense and specific trials and studies will exacerbate vulnerabilities and retrench relations, while not providing outcomes of any net benefit.
Pastor here aligns with Hjorth’s approach of empowerment, to bring design as a method in service the community, not to evangelize it with our perspectives or beliefs. Sharing experiences, understanding problems, and codesigning solutions with participants doesn’t simply play lip service to more creating descriptive images, but instead forces designers, researchers and health professionals to relinquish the power and expertise we so often hold over situations and projects. Making the person expert in their story and lending them tools which they can use and co-create through can elicit opportunities for artistry and craftsmanship that so many older people yearn for.
Design as a barrier to innovation and obstacle to communication
This notion of re-considering tools and methods in support of participants is provided more granularity on the through the assertion of the barriers and obstacles it brings. When designing for innovation, the goal cannot be for something of self-perceived and attention seeking result, but of outcomes which are truly life-changing or impacting for the participants and collaborators. Certainly, Virtual Reality and other emerging technologies offer fantastic new experiences and potential for this cohort, but if their reality is that of little time in nature, or prescriptive and repetitive social activities, googles into a digital world might not serve pressing needs.
As an example of a designed environment, when discussing virtual things or experiences, such as menus, objects or interactions, we also need to be careful around the language, colloquialisms and jargon we slip into. Beyond this, we also need to appreciate the backgrounds, ideas and beliefs participants bring, as the forgotten such as CALD older people might not bring with them the same tacit ways of engaging with the world, nor the capabilities to explore and learn technologies readily. As Pastor explains, we need to adapt our tools to the cultural, educational, and personal context to make sure they encourage communication instead of misunderstanding.
Design as a troublemaker
Finally, is realising that when we investigate, engage or try to capture social systems and the people within them, we are inevitably changing and altering that system with our presence. I want to explore this notion in two specific ways: Invitations & Conversations. Helping to see the worlds we inquire with and without our presence as designers (where are we instead family members or carers) can help us see where we overstep and where we dis-empower.
In designing/intervening in the lives, routines and rituals of others, we need to realise the need for invitation and seek consents in the things we discuss and the data we collect. Sarah Pink, a world leading Design Anthropologist, discuses in her work not only gaining consent for research ethics, but also to further ask how participants feel about providing certain descriptions, answers or recordings, where lines become blurred or crossed, and how they want to direct and explore their stories and memories.
Hjorth and colleagues further examine and explore the ‘conversations’ between ourselves, our bodies, non-human bodies such as objects and artifacts and macro-bodies in places, landscapes. Conversations enable us to contrast the ‘domestication’ of technologies by older people, with how devices and digital interactions shape the identities and perceptions of older people.
Designers have the skills to take the complex and difficult problems which we find or people bring up, and explore them in conversations through ethnographic participatory methods. With these opportunities comes the need to reduce our negative impacts on the people and outcome of our work, to make sure that we aren’t making trouble and risking participants in the process.
In light of the present pandemic, my own research is pivoting digitally, and need to make efforts to made to make sure participants are not left in the lurch and their interests are kept at heart. Aged care residents are being affected and restricted due the the current pandemic, reducing their opportunities for health and wellbeing, exposing them to loneliness and depression.
The social engagement of this cohort is an area with the chance to truly benefit the lives of older people, but the with the potential to miss the mark, or to forget those who might not so easily have a voice or be advocated for. As a designer and researcher, I want to lead practice which examines this mutual shaping of ageing and technology, and does so in a reflective and informed way, guided by how we invite and converse with others
Thank you for reading, while my field research is on hiatus due to the Covid19 global health emergency, I am making the most of working from home to reflect, and look forward to getting out at designing experimentally!
Take care and be safe over these uncertain times, as we need to care for the elderly and vulnerable more than ever.
Jacob Sheahan |PhD Design Candiate @RMIT |jacobsheahan.com
