HCI has long been interested in mitigating interactional difficulties arising from physical and/or cognitive decline that can accompany aging, but there is growing sentiment that a limited focus on age-related deficit perpetuates negative stereotypes of older adults while obscuring various other salient dimensions of people’s complicated relationships with technology in their old age. In 2019, the CHI workshop titled “HCI and Aging: Beyond Accessibility” convened researchers and practitioners to consider what, besides accessibility, ought to be addressed to make digital technologies more valuable to older adult users.
Discussion at the workshop arrived at a clear consensus that conflating concerns about ‘aging’ with concerns about ‘accessibility’ was harmful to older adults, as captured in the resulting article co-authored by attendees. This workshop picks up where the previous workshop left off: If the field no longer locates its impetus in mitigating interactional difficulties arising from physical and/or cognitive decline, then what is distinctive about older adults as a user group that means they need different considerations when designing and evaluating interactive systems? And what is HCI’s relationship to age and aging becoming?
The first aim of the workshop is to explore how and why the field of HCI and Aging has changed in recent years in order to identify emergent areas for research. Of particular interest are:
• Advances in theorization
Given the growing calls for HCI research to avoid treating older adults as a monolith, is ‘older adult’ a meaningful category? How do we even know when age is a relevant characteristic in people’s interactions with technologies? Can we learn from related fields such as sociology, psychology, and gerontology to inform a more critical or theory-driven wave in HCI and Aging research? Or, indeed, can HCI offer new theory that extends what is already known in these fields? Given the growing interest in lifecourse and intersectionality, what do these perspectives do for the field, and where do they take our research? If age is socially constructed, how might we critically examine technology’s role in that construction and how it manifests in different cultures? And in considering the potential role of digital technologies in provision of care, should we move away from transactional, hierarchical, and deficit-based views of care in favor of care as relational and reciprocal?
• Changes in the technology landscape
How are older adults navigating an increasingly data-driven world? How are they using this data in their everyday lives? How is data and IoT driving changes to the delivery of older adult health and social care, and what are the impacts of these trends on older adult wellbeing? For what purposes are older adults using or rejecting voice technologies, and how might such systems be designed to be equitable? How might algorithms and AI systems perpetuate ageism, and what can be done to mitigate these effects? And with the shift towards a human-centered approach to data interaction and AI, how can we ensure the integration of older people’s perspectives and voices in these endeavors?
• Insights from the pandemic
Given that use of digital technologies increased significantly among older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, what lessons should we as a field take from this? How did technology influence the way older people managed their daily routines and maintained social relations during the pandemic? How has the pandemic perturbed technology relations for older adults? Which new practices have been sustained once the world returned to normal, which haven’t, and what does that tell us about how to meet older adults’ needs and wants? Have new experiences with technology positively or negatively influenced attitudes to technology? How might all this inform approaches to the so-called ‘digital divide’ between young and old?
These questions reflect the organizers’ own perspectives on exciting developments in the field, but this list is by no means comprehensive. The workshop will produce a more thorough mapping of the current areas of interest to be able to reflect on how and why the shape of HCI and Aging is changing.
The second aim of the workshop is to address “the lack of understanding and stereotypical views about older people by young researchers and developers”. To this end, the workshop will engage researchers and practitioners in conversation about what aspects of age matter, when, and why in order to distill a set of principles for attending to matters of age in HCI. We anticipate some of these principles speaking to recurrent challenges in doing HCI research with and for older adults, for example, how to do research with a population that is constantly evolving as new cohorts (with more experience with technology) age into ‘older adulthood’, how researchers might define appropriate selection criteria for participatory research with this population, how to reach the ‘hard-to-reach’ and most digitally excluded older adults, how to do research with individuals with dementia, and how to bring older adults in to the digital economy without engaging in practices of predatory inclusion. We anticipate other principles encapsulating key insights or considerations about age that can inform research and practice beyond the HCI and Aging community, for example, how to maximize benefits and minimize harm to older adult stakeholders (i.e. to both users and non-users of various technologies), which generalizations about older adults are helpful and under what circumstances, how to meaningfully include older adults in the design process, how to critically reflect on one’s own negative stereotypes of aging, and even what language to use or not use in referring to older adults. In developing this set of principles, we will reflect in particular on what has been learned since 2015, when Vines et al. proposed their influential set of recommendations for HCI and Aging research.