# Senior Living Lab: An Ecological Approach to Foster Social Innovation in an Ageing Society
## 6 Discussion: Role of ICT in the SLL and Participatory Design Practices
### Technology Fear versus Innovation  
Information and communication technology have received increasing attention from the research community to support ageing well. The H2020 and the AAL programs particularly encourage the application of ICT as a support for older adults' everyday life. While there are clear benefits of using technologies for this purpose, older adults are often afraid of technology. Even if this statement is controversial (some studies stated that older adults have positive attitudes toward technologies [40]), our experience confirmed this attitude during the different focus groups that we organized. In particular, the reason for this fear is not only related to the difficulty to learn a new interface, but it is often related to the fear of losing social contacts with other people because of the technology. Unfortunately, this fear is often well justified, because many digital services tend to replace the human operator, in order to cut costs and speed up the operation. While this is acceptable for younger people, older adults, especially those living alone, often regret that in our increasingly digitalized society, they are losing many opportunities for social exchanges with other people. As a solution toward this attitude, the Senior Living Lab and other living labs for ageing well should not be presented to older adults as a technology mediator. In addition, products and services that would be co-designed with older adults should not necessarily involve technology. Nevertheless, technology plays a relevant role in innovation and, if correctly designed, has the potential of having a huge impact on the quality of life of elders. This is a real contradiction, and the fear of new technologies can block the development and the creation of innovations potentially helpful to older adults. This is particularly relevant in participatory design approaches in which older adults are involved from the beginning of the conceptual design of a solution and can therefore ostracize the adoption of novel technologies. As the results of the first year's activities (world cafes, focus groups, ethnographic studies and workshops involving more than 100 participants), we have learned that:  
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2. Invisible technologies (technologies that are transparent to the user's eyes as in the [PERSON] definition [41]) can reduce the fear of novel technologies. This kind of solution is well accepted by older adults in particular if they address a specific need. Invisible technologies are an important field of study in the human-computer interaction field. For instance, in one of the focus groups organized by the Senior Living Lab, older adults had shared consensus in disliking solutions based on the generic idea of creating objects enriched by displays or touch screens. However, they appreciated the idea of having \"augmented\" physical objects, if they are already confident with the utilization of the object. For instance, the participants liked the idea of having a technologically-enhanced magnifying glass to use in a supermarket context to retrieve additional information about a product by just using the glass on the product. In this example, older adults do not have to learn how to use a new tool or navigate in a touch screen menu, they already know how to use it. They just have the possibility to use it with new objects to obtain different information. This is a clear example of invisible technology. 3. The use of technology is highly stratified by age, gender, marital status and educational background. This is confirmed also from other studies, such as [39]. Therefore, designers of interfaces have to carefully consider these aspects and adapt their solutions to the target population for which they are designing a technological solution. In other terms, in most of the cases, \"older adults\" is not a good enough segmentation for the design of ICT-based solutions. 4. The usefulness of a technology is not enough to make a product or service acceptable: it is crucial to avoid the older adults' stigmatization.