In this short research comic, we travelled to three digital health and social care initiatives across
Europe that each try to contribute to the well-being of older people by addressing one aspect of
“good ageing” that they deem relevant.
Our research comic highlights three distinct points that deserve
more attention if we want to understand better the role of new
technologies in the lives of older people and create tools that
enable forms of good ageing that are relevant to them.
REFLECTIONS
32
1. Interactions between different and sometimes conflicting forms of good ageing
shape the engagement with proposed technologies or services.
Although eating healthily is, as many people we encountered
during my fieldwork would agree, important to ageing
well, it is not the only consideration when it comes to
eating. Other considerations like eating as a moment
of socialising, eating as a pleasure left in later life,
or food as a collective rather than individual choice,
also matter.
Similarly, building and maintaining close relations with others was
important to many, but relations of what kind, where, and when? In
situations like that of Alba, where the everyday is already filled with
pain, positive and happy forms of relations are welcome while more
negative or sad forms of relations are best avoided or deleted.
2. The arts of noticing can reveal the invisible, including those details that too often
remain unnoticed but are crucial for understanding how technologies can become
meaningful for people.
Consider the misalignment between the e-coaching messages
and the recipe recommendations. This misalignment was invisible
to technology developers and pilot site managers but important
for understanding Giampiero’s and Maria’s non-use of the recipe
recommendations.
Or think of the difficulty of asking for help that Carolina
described. This reluctance to ask for help, and the subsequent
silent coping, may render everyday worries of residents in the
parish in Milton Keynes invisible to those who do not pay close
attention.
If not noticed and attended to, these invisible and seemingly mundane details can make
digital health and care initiatives meaningless for those for whom they are meant.
33
3. Technologies in health and ageing do more than just contribute to the idea of
good ageing that they were envisioned for.
Sometimes, technologies contradict what they were
meant to do. We saw this in the case of the algorithm
that selected breakfast recipes that had little
to do with the older people’s habits or
ideas of healthy eating.
Sometimes, technologies become
very helpful but in ways completely different from what
was expected. In the case of Carmela, for instance, the
tablet became her lifeline although she could not find the
friendship she was looking for through the tablet.
At the same time, technologies can contribute to rendering relevant
concerns invisible. The tablet is a lifeline for Carmela, but it does not solve
the concern of her experiencing loneliness, a concern that remains invisible and
unresolved.
Or technologies can trigger completely new and initially unintended
practices towards good ageing. One example is the case of deleting
the profile picture and chat of a sister who passed away but whose
traces were still digitally stored in the VinclesBCN app, causing
pain to the older woman.
Or as in the case of the residents in the parish in Milton Keynes who
initiated coffee mornings as a way of carrying the community project further and
reaching out to those who were less easily included.
34
35
All in all, technologies are much more
than just a neutral tool for good
ageing. What they are will be different
in different contexts, as they are also
shaped by these contexts.
Methods, time, and resources for
close and ongoing attention to these
contexts are thus paramount to
help (digital) health and social care
initiatives facilitate forms of good
ageing that older adults themselves
find relevant.
If you want to know more, or engage in the arts
of noticing yourself, we have added below some
experiences and reflections on the process of
noticing as well as on the format of the research
comic. References to literature that inspired and
informed our work are included throughout.
35
Some Reflections on the Arts of Noticing, What it Requires, and What it Affords
The Concept in More Detail
When Tsing (2015) describes her concept of the “arts of noticing,”1 she compares it to the act
of listening to polyphonic music. In polyphonic music, various melodies and rhythms intertwine.
As Tsing writes, polyphony made her learn to “pick out separate, simultaneous melodies
and to
listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together” (2015, 24; emphasis
in original). This listening or close attention to various things or ways of being and their
relations is what the arts of noticing is about.
Tsing proposes the arts of noticing as a method that may help us move beyond ideas of
“progress” that are so deeply embedded in our practices, thinking, and imagination. Progress
works as “a forward march [that draws] other kinds of time into its rhythms” (2015, 21). To
notice what else is going on, the multiple other rhythms and trajectories of world-making, Tsing
calls for embracing the indeterminacy and precarity that are with us every day. Doing so, she
argues, may help us move beyond narratives of progress as well as tales of ruination. It provides
indication and imagination for collaborative survival in a world of promise and ruin.
In our research comic, we engaged in the arts of noticing by paying attention to the various forms
of good ageing that coexist and interfere in the design, deployment, and use of digital health
and social care initiatives and to the moments of harmony and friction that these interferences
create. This goes beyond classical program evaluation work that formulates normative notions
of good ageing that are then used as a yardstick to evaluate the lives of older people and
the effectiveness or impact of technological interventions (e.g., Schulz et al. 2015). Instead,
our noticing allows us to situate older people’s engagement with the proposed technologies in
alignments and mismatches between tech developers’ ideas about good ageing and the lived
experiences of older adults.
Our story does not end with rejection and abandoned investments, though. By noticing and
articulating practices like deleting the profile of a loved one, or building a toolbox for sharing
equipment, our research comic shows how digital innovations can be made functional and
meaningful for those involved. Sharing Tsing’s aim of moving beyond narratives of progress
as well as tales of ruination, the stories of our participants open the imagination for how to
configure and reconfigure good ageing together in digital innovation initiatives and beyond.
Experiences on the Process of Noticing
Noticing is a relational and collaborative process. Our attempt at noticing the many forms of
good ageing has been possible thanks to the shared moments of noticing together with the
older adults, the community and city council workers, the technology developers, and the places,
technologies, and relations in which they are embedded. This, in turn, shows that practicing the
arts of noticing requires methods that allow close and affective relations with those present in
the field. Without it, some of the diversity and complexity of the many forms of good ageing
that we noticed in this piece would remain invisible. The daily pain Alba has to live with and
how she tries to make it bearable by surrounding herself with positive things and deleting
negative ones is one example. Sharing these experiences had been rendered possible, in part, by
the attention that the older adults and Carla as researcher offered each other throughout the
different moments spent together. In this sense, our research comic reiterates the relevance
4By speaking of the “arts of noticing” in plural, Tsing emphasies that there are always multiple ways of noticing. The
formulation highlights that the arts of noticing is not an abstract concept but a concrete practice with multiple forms.
36
4
that feminist studies of technoscience attributed to intimacy and affective relations for research
and knowledge creation (for an overview, see Latimer and López Gómez 2019).
A second aspect that is worth pointing out is the role of frictions as a tool for noticing. Many
of the fieldwork excerpts included in this research comic illustrate situations where something
happened that the pilot or service organisers had not initially intended or expected. These
situations show tensions, or frictions, between the forms of good ageing embedded in the
technology or service and the everyday lives and values of older adults, often expressed in doubts,
non-use, or other forms of resistance (for a similar use of the notion of frictions, see also López
Gómez 2015): Carmela did not find a friend through VinclesBCN and stopped engaging in the
service despite longing for social connections. Agata might make the sacrifice of following the
recipes she receives in the pilot app, but does not because she knows that those who eat with
her might not like the dishes. Olive might use the community app to ask for help with putting
up her painting but is concerned because she does not have a hammer. Being aware of such
frictions was productive for the noticing process. At the same time, we also use frictions as a tool
to convey what has been noticed. For instance, by juxtaposing the various considerations that
affect how pilot participants in Puglia engage or disengage with the recipe recommendations, we
accentuate a friction that was hidden and distributed across field notes and interviews – that
for them, food is not only a question of health but also a moment of socialising, of collective
choice, or of enjoying one of the pleasures left in later life.
Finally, and in line with some of the aims of multimodal research (Collins et al. 2017), we
approach noticing as an open-ended process. The open-endedness points to the ways in which,
we hope, this research comic does not end here but will spark further moments of noticing and
attending to the multiplicity of forms of good ageing. Designer and researcher Helena Cleeve
(2023) beautifully illustrates how the process of drawing situations in a care home and engaging
about these drawings with others can become a way of learning together through seeing and
unseeing. As Cleeve writes, drawing and engaging about these drawings allowed her to see new
things but also to unsee, that is, “abandon preconceived notions of what I was looking at”
(2023, 752). The process of preparing our story, with its drawings, quotes, and accompanying
reflections, has already triggered moments of seeing and unseeing in many ways. The format
of the research comic is meant to allow this to continue in different places, in and beyond
academia, together with those who participated in this research and with others.
Some Reflections on the Format of the Research Comic
Our research comic about the many forms of good ageing is connected to a rich body of
theoretical and empirical work that illuminates in further detail the points that we have
illustrated in this piece.1 The contribution of our work primarily lies in its format. We wanted to
experiment with ways to share reflections on technology and ageing, which we and many other
researchers engage with in our work, with a broader audience. Our aim was to share reflections
with researchers but also with the older adults, city and community councils, social workers,
and technology developers with whom we collaborated in the field. As digital health and social
care initiatives proliferate, nuanced descriptions of everyday practices and experiences of ageing
remain relevant and deserve to be shared and discussed outside of specialised academic fields.
5Interested readers might, for example, look into the book
Care in Practice (Mol et al. 2010), which vividly elucidates the
complex relations between technology and care. The book
Socio-gerontechnology (Peine et al. 2021) offers another rich
collection of critical investigations specifically related to technology and ageing. Questions about ageing as a bodily and
cultural process are, for instance, discussed in
Ageing in Everyday Life (Katz 2019). For questions on affect and intimacy
in ageing and technology relations, readers might look into
Intimate Entanglements (Latimer and López Gómez 2019).
37
5
Following Lehtonen and Putkonen (2023), the graphic novel or research comic lends itself to
this goal because it affords (1) expressing embodied experiences, (2) providing context, and (3)
developing theoretical reflection by integrating multiple layers of analysis. As anthropologists
Stacy Leigh Pigg and Shyam Kunwar add, the research comic does not seek to be an argument-
driven intervention but rather invites an open-ended interpretation. It foregrounds the “dynamic
relations amongst points of view and [invites readers] to think more nibly about scale, context,
relationality and perspective” (2021, 362).
Inspired by the work of these authors, we present our research in the form of drawings, fieldwork
quotes, and accompanying reflections.1 Some drawings are informed by pictures taken of people
and places during fieldwork but given a different touch to ensure anonymity. Quotes are taken
from original interviews and informal conversations, conducted in Italian, Spanish (Castellano),
and English. The first author, with help from friends who are native speakers, translated quotes
from Italian and Spanish into English. We altered or shortened some quotes for readability, but
always paid careful attention to not change the content of what had been said. The exception
is the scene where Jack and Carla meet Carolina: we added the introductory sentences of Jack
and Carolina, because originally the conversations with both happened in separate interviews. We
invited our research participants to propose a name for the person that represents them in our
story. Some wanted to be mentioned with their actual names, others proposed fictitious names,
and for those who did not respond, we selected fictitious names ourselves.
In weaving the arts of noticing into this format of the research comic, our piece advocates for
attending to differences and details and for geographic, cultural, and affective closeness to the
everyday lives of those older adults for and with whom technology developers and community
councils design tools and services for ageing well. Such closeness, we think, is paramount for
exploring together the diversity of forms of good ageing that are present in a specific context. It
is a first relevant step in being able to notice conflicts between different forms of good ageing
and to adjust digital tools and services in such a way that they facilitate forms of good ageing
that older adults themselves find relevant – or to stop investing time and resources in them
when they do not.
Besides being published digitally in an academic journal, this research comic will also be printed
in the three languages used during fieldwork (Italian, Castellano, and English). We will then
share and discuss it with research participants. As such, we propose this research comic as one
iteration in generating close and open-ended relations through which to explore the many forms
of good ageing together with research participants.
6We also want to mention three graphic novels that particularly inspired our work on this piece:
Soledad, by Tito, which
sparked the idea for a research comic, and
Shadow Life, by Goto and Xu, as well as
Sixty Years in Winter
, by Chabbert
and de Jongh, which were important sources of inspiration during the development process.
38
6
CRediT Author Statement: Conceptualisation: Carla Greubel. and Hanna Stalenhoef.; Investigation and
analysis: Carla Greubel; Visualisation: Hanna Stalenhoef; Writing – original draft: Carla Greubel; Writing –
review & editing: Carla Greubel, Hanna Stalenhoef, Alexander Peine, Ellen H. M. Moors, Susan van Hees,
Daniel López Gómez; Supervision: Alexander Peine, Ellen H. M. Moors, Susan van Hees, Daniel López
Gómez (fieldwork in Barcelona); Funding acquisition: Alexander Peine, Daniel López Gómez.
Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the generosity of those I (Carla) worked with in my field sites,
for your time, for sharing ideas and practices on the role of innovations in “good ageing,” and for
your immense hospitality. It has been a pleasure working with Samantha MacFarlane as special issue
editor. Thank you for your support in the preparation of this research comic. We are grateful to the two
anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback. We also wish to thank our friends who
provided valuable feedback, proofreading, and support at several stages of the research comic preparation:
Alberico Sabbadini, Federico deMusso, Charles Crittal, Natacha Legroux, and Meïdi Sakhraoui. The research
upon which this manuscript is based was generously funded by the European Commission under the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement N 857223).
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Ethics and Consent: This research received ethical approval from the Ethics Review Board of the Faculty
of Geo-Sciences at Utrecht University, with the approval number S-21587. All participants signed an
informed consent form prior to their participation in this research.
Art: By Hanna Stalenhoef and Alberico Sabbadini. etnoGRAFISCH www.etnografisch.nl
The research comic font (Jack Armstrong) has been downloaded from http://www.onlinewebfonts.com
References
Chabbert, Ingrid and Aimée de Jongh. 2022.
Sixty Years in Winter
. Marcinelle: Dupuis.
Cleeve, Helena. 2023. “Drawing in Ethnography: Seeing and Unseeing Everyday Life with Dementia in
Sweden.”
Medical Anthropology 42 (8): 752-70. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2023.2235068.
Collins, Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017. “Multimodality: An Invitation.”
American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12826.
Goto, Hiromi, and Ann Xu. 2021.
Shadow Life. New York: First Second.
Katz, Stephen, ed. 2019.
Ageing in Everyday Life: Materialities and Embodiments. Bristol: Policy Press.
Latimer, Joanna, and Daniel López Gómez, eds. 2019.
Intimate Entanglements. London: The Sociological
Review.
Lehtonen, Miikka J., and Samuel Putkonen. 2023. “Towards ‘Strong’ Multimodality: How Graphic
Novels Can Help Us Rethink Modes.”
Journal of Management Inquiry 32 (4): 1-17. https://doi.
org/10.1177/10564926231174805.
López Gómez, Daniel. 2015. “Little Arrangements that Matter: Rethinking Autonomy-Enabling Innovations
for Later Life.”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change 93: 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
techfore.2014.02.015.
Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeanette Pols, eds. 2010.
Care in Practice : On Tinkering in Clinics,
Homes and Farms
. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Peine, Alexander, Barbara L. Marshall, Wendy Martin, and Louis Neven, eds. 2021.
Socio-gerontechnology:
Interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Ageing and Technology. London: Routledge.
Pigg, Stacy Leigh, and Shyam Kunwar. 2021. “On the Roadside: Pangs of Memory, Tastes of Futures.”
Multimodality & Society 1 (3): 350-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349795211028731.
Schulz, Richard, Hans-Werner Wahl, Judith T. Matthews, Annette De Vito Dabbs, Scott R. Beach, and Sara
J. Czaja (2015) “Advancing the Aging and Technology Agenda in Gerontology.”
The Gerontologist
55 (5): 724–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnu071.
Tito. 2022.
Soledad: Intégrale
. French Edition. Translated by Hélène Dauniol-Remaud. Brussels: Casterman.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

## Références

Chabbert, Ingrid and Aimée de Jongh. 2022. Sixty Years in Winter. Marcinelle: Dupuis.

Helena. 2023. “Drawing in Ethnography: Seeing and Unseeing Everyday Life with Dementia in Sweden.” Medical Anthropology 42 (8): 752-70. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2023.2235068.

Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017. “Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12826.

Goto, Hiromi, and Ann Xu. 2021. Shadow Life. New York: First Second.

Stephen, ed. 2019. Ageing in Everyday Life: Materialities and Embodiments. Bristol: Policy Press.

Latimer, Joanna, and Daniel López Gómez, eds. 2019. Intimate Entanglements. London: The Sociological Review.

Miikka J., and Samuel Putkonen. 2023. “Towards ‘Strong’ Multimodality: How Graphic Novels Can Help Us Rethink Modes.” Journal of Management Inquiry 32 (4): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926231174805.

Gómez, Daniel. 2015. “Little Arrangements that Matter: Rethinking Autonomy-Enabling Innovations for Later Life.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 93: 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2014.02.015.

Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeanette Pols, eds. 2010. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Alexander, Barbara L. Marshall, Wendy Martin, and Louis Neven, eds. 2021. Socio-gerontechnology: Interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Ageing and Technology. London: Routledge.

Stacy Leigh, and Shyam Kunwar. 2021. “On the Roadside: Pangs of Memory, Tastes of Futures.” Multimodality & Society 1 (3): 350-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349795211028731.

Richard, Hans-Werner Wahl, Judith T. Matthews, Annette De Vito Dabbs, Scott R. Beach, and Sara J. Czaja (2015) “Advancing the Aging and Technology Agenda in Gerontology.” The Gerontologist 55 (5): 724–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnu071.

Tito. 2022. Soledad: Intégrale. French Edition. Translated by Hélène Dauniol-Remaud. Brussels: Casterman.

Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.