Ageing together: Steps towards evolutionary co-design in everyday practices

TLDR

Communities of practice with limited resources challenge short‑term co‑design and require updates to extended design approaches that assume high user skill. The article outlines a temporally extended co‑design process of media technologies with elderly people. The authors employ a temporally extended co‑design methodology, engaging elderly users throughout the development of media technologies. The study identifies design strategies that sustain collaboration, highlights the need for extended, evolutionary design approaches for low‑resource communities, and presents ageing‑together strategies that adjust co‑designers' engagement repertoire.

Abstract

In this article we outline a temporally extended co-design process of media technologies developed in collaboration with elderly people. In the course of doing this, we identify a set of design strategies that helped to sustain the collaboration. Based on our experiences, we recognise the need for developing design strategies for extended and evolutionary design collaborations with ordinary communities that have special needs, and do not possess significant resourcing, design experience or skills in the technology in question. Such communities of practice pose challenges to shorter term project-centred forms of co-design and also require updates to the existing extended design approaches, which rest on relatively high user skill and resourcing. The ‘ageing together’ design strategies outlined in this article hence take necessary steps in adjusting co-designers' repertoires of engagement in this type of everyday context.