Co-designing with Older Adults: Navigating Tensions and Avoiding Peer Stereotyping
By: Alisha Pradhan
Tags: Older Adults, Design, Research, Hcil Symposium 2020

Moving from stereotyping to designing for themselves: Between the two workshops, we observed that participants shifted from thinking primarily about “other older people” as the end user, to designing for themselves. In the first workshop, the discussion centered on the general needs of older adults instead of individual needs. For example, one participant who initiated a discussion of medication reminders revealed later that she “wasn’t very excited about it in the first day… I thought it would be a good idea and useful. I took care of my elderly mother who had lots of medications.”

On the other hand, in the take home journals and second workshop, participants focused on their own needs. They envisioned technology solutions for themselves, and even thinking of how the new technology would integrate in their homes. For example, one group worked together to design an organizer to help them with “clutter” in their house, which “would be more of a presence” in their own house. We traced this focus on their own need back to their take home journals. Participants focused on their own needs when they saw their descriptions and quotes used in the customize design workshop materials.

Instances of participants stereotyping themselves, as in our first workshop, are concerning. Reflecting on our approach of grouping participants, we see that although pairing individuals could lead to higher quality ideas, it also causes more “convergence” of ideas, where participants attempted to find commonalities between themselves — which could lead to stereotyping. Techniques from creativity research such as “nominal grouping” methods, where each team member works separately and their responses are aggregated, could be one approach to support divergent thinking.

Attitudes towards technology affecting group dynamics and design outcome: During the second design workshop, there were times when tensions within participant pairs arose while attempting to converge on a final design idea. These tensions were primarily due to their difference in attitudes towards technology (e.g., considering oneself as “low tech”, interest in utilizing technology more in daily life, etc) and led to participants feeling that they did not connect with their design partners.

In addition to attitudes towards technology, knowledge accumulated by usage and familiarity of available technologies affected the ways participants engaged in design. Participants designed new technologies which connected to the technologies that they were currently using and familiar with. Moreover, participants who used commercial IoT were less worried about privacy concerns, leading them to include currently used IoT technologies in their final design, unlike those who did not use commercial IoT. One approach to ensure better pairings might use scales to measure and group people by their attitudes towards technology in general as well as emerging IoT technologies. These scales could also measure individuals’ trust towards companies’ data handling practices.