Ania Bobrowicz

Engaging the disengaged: how do we design technology for digitally excluded older adults?

Amongst older adults, recent evidence suggests the most commonly stated reason for non-adoption of digital technologies is a lack of interest, rather than affordability or difficulty. This directly impacts upon the design community, both in terms of technologies we design for such groups to adopt, and the design methods we use for exploiting the untapped creativity and innovation amongst people who are not particularly interested in the outcome. This paper explores issues of technology non-acceptance amongst older adults, and reports on work designed to incorporate the values of older adults within the design process. We present the results of a series of interviews conducted with disengaged older adults, presenting the key themes found within a subset with these interviews.

Challenges of ethical and legal responsibilities when technologies' uses and users change: social networking sites, decision-making capacity and dementia

Successful technologies’ ubiquity changes uses, users and ethicolegal responsibilities and duties of care. We focus on dementia to review critically ethicolegal implications of increasing use of social networking sites (SNS) by those with compromised decision-making capacity, assessing concerned parties’ responsibilities. Although SNS contracts assume ongoing decision-making capacity, many users’ may be compromised or declining. Resulting ethicolegal issues include capacity to give informed consent to contracts, protection of online privacy including sharing and controlling data, data leaks between different digital platforms, and management of digital identities and footprints. SNS uses in healthcare raise additional issues. Online materials acting as archives of ‘the self’ bolster present and future identities for users with compromised capacity. E-health involves actual and potential intersection of data gathered for the purpose of delivering health technological support with data used for social networking purposes. Ethicolegal guidance is limited on the implications of SNS usage in contexts where users have impaired/reduced capacity to understand and/or consent to sharing personal data about their health, medication or location. Vulnerable adults and family/carers face uncertainty in regard to consent, data protection, online identity and legal liabilities. Ethicolegal responsibilities and duties of care of technology providers, healthcare professionals, regulatory bodies and policymakers need clarification.

Exploring the potential of virtual worlds in engaging older people and supporting healthy aging

There is an increasing need to find innovative activities to help the older population maintain a healthy life. Virtual worlds, which can provide social engagement, entertainment and creativity as well as useful information and services for older people might offer a solution to this issue. Although emerging studies have begun to look into the benefits of virtual worlds in healthcare, little has been done in the context of older people. Based on semi-structured interviews and previous research on healthy aging, we identified and described in depth four areas in which virtual worlds could be useful to support older people. In general, it was found that virtual worlds could help empower older people to manage their disabilities, facilitate social engagement, provide mental stimulation and productive activities.

Effects of gesture-based avatar-mediated communication on brainstorming and negotiation tasks among younger users

This paper reports on a study which investigated the effects of gesture-based avatar-mediated communication on younger users (12-13years old), in comparison to video-mediated communication. Specifically, we looked at how these technologies were used by school pupils to brainstorm and negotiate ideas in a bullying context. 64 school pupils were divided into two conditions (Skype and AvatarKinect) and were instructed to carry out two tasks (a brainstorming and a negotiation task). Objective task performance, perceived satisfaction and perceived partners characteristics were compared. We found no difference in term of perceived satisfaction. AvatarKinect users reported more positive changes in perceptions toward their partner. The results on task performance were ambivalent; Skype users seemed to generate more ideas, whilst AvatarKinect produced better quality ideas. In summary, gesture-based avatar technology appears to be a useful modality to help resolve bullying in schools.

Comparison of engagement and emotional responses of older and younger adults interacting with 3D cultural heritage artefacts on personal devices

The availability of advanced software and less expensive hardware allows museums to preserve and share artefacts digitally. As a result, museums are frequently making their collections accessible online as interactive, 3D models. This could lead to the unique situation of viewing the digital artefact before the physical artefact. Experiencing artefacts digitally outside of the museum on personal devices may affect the users ability to emotionally connect to the artefacts. This study examines how two target populations of young adults (18–21 years) and the elderly (65 years and older) responded to seeing cultural heritage artefacts in three different modalities: augmented reality on a tablet, 3D models on a laptop, and then physical artefacts. Specifically, the time spent, enjoyment, and emotional responses were analysed. Results revealed that regardless of age, the digital modalities were enjoyable and encouraged emotional responses. Seeing the physical artefacts after the digital ones did not lessen their enjoyment or emotions felt. These findings aim to provide an insight into the effectiveness of 3D artefacts viewed on personal devices and artefacts shown outside of the museum for encouraging emotional responses from older and younger people.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community online: discussions of bullying and self-disclosure in YouTube videos

Computer-mediated communication has become a popular platform for identity construction and experimentation as well as social interaction for those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). The creation of user-generated videos has allowed content creators to share experiences on LGBT topics. With bullying becoming more common amongst LGBT youth, it is important to obtain a greater understanding of this phenomenon. In our study, we report on the analysis of 151 YouTube videos which were identified as having LGBT- and bullying-related content. The analysis reveals how content creators openly disclose personal information about themselves and their experiences in a non-anonymous rhetoric with an unknown public. These disclosures could indicate a desire to seek friendship, support and provide empathy.

Data in the wild: some reflections

than more expansively creating data apropos a research question leads to difficulties deploying theory. Theories propose elements and relations that are tested with hypotheses or checked against ordered observations. Data must speak to the semantics of the elements and relations. A found corpus may or may not have pertinent data. Trivial or obvious results may be reported in research centered on data-mining analysis because often such results are all the investigator could squeeze from the data. Findings that more contextualized methodologies easily capture may require more extensive processing of a large dataset or may evade the researcher altogether. Even grounded theory, which begins with data, often requires further data collection once interesting theoretical problems emerge. With found data, a loss of philosophical and epistemological grounding occurs as research is conducted with data over which the investigator has and other data-mining techniques to search for emerging patterns in existing datasets—rather than generate new data for planned hypothesis testing or qualitative exploration—is transforming the way research is being conducted. When we say “data in the wild,” we point to the fact that the datasets are not constructed and designed with research questions in mind, as in conventional surveys, censuses, interviews, logs, observational studies, and experimental studies. Conventional datasets are generally planned according to conceptual or theoretical interests, with articulated research questions. Researchers decide which attributes, variables, and data types are of interest prior to data collection. Conversely, if all the researcher has is, for example, a Twitter feed, it is not possible to ask questions such as “What is the political affiliation of this poster?” Using data-mining approaches, researchers can ask questions of the data, but the questions must be scoped to exactly what is available. Adhering to material that In recent years, the proliferation of online services such as social networking, gaming, Internet fora, and chat rooms has provided academic and corporate researchers opportunities to acquire and analyze large volumes of data on human activity and social interaction online. For example, massive corpora from Facebook, Twitter, and other user-generated data sources are being harvested “in the wild” on the Internet. Research based on such “found data” is increasingly common, as software tools become sophisticated enough to allow researchers to forage for data at fairly low cost. Researchers can now “not merely do more of the same, but in some cases conduct qualitatively new forms of analysis” [1]. Novel computational methods are being developed to integrate multiple distinct and often heterogeneous datasets (e.g., mobile location data and Twitter feeds) in the hope that important new relationships will emerge that cannot be found using a single data source. The growing tendency to apply new machine learning Data in the Wild: Some Reflections

Exhibiting Emotion: Capturing Visitors’ Emotional Responses to Museum Artefacts

The museum provides the perfect setting for the convergence of culture, reflection, personal connections, and communication, and many museums supplement these visitor experiences through the use of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems. While there has been past HCI research on various combinations of these four areas, the overall goal of this study is to explore the emotional links museum visitors make while encompassing all four areas through the use of engaging HCI technologies. This paper reports on the results of a study carried out at the Powell-Cotton Museum, a local ethnographic museum located in south-east Kent, UK. Using structured interviews and thematic analysis, visitors’ emotional responses to museum artefacts were analysed. Findings suggest that when given the task of providing emotional responses to artefacts, visitors are motivated to find meaningful and personal connections.

Narrating past to present: conveying the needs and values of older people to young digital technology designers

In this paper we discuss preliminary findings from the first stage of our SEEDS study (SEEDS: An Organic Approach to Virtual Participatory Design), a collaborative research project between Universities of Dundee, Kent and Leeds, United Kingdom. This feasibility study investigates how to motivate older people to engage with digital technology, as well as how to improve understanding of older peoples needs and requirements amongst young designers. As part of this study we recorded interviews with older people which investigated their motivations to use or not use digital technologies and themes pertaining to their (dis)engagement. A virtual repository was created to make collected interviews, which were presented as social stories, available to engineering, technology and design students. In this paper we discuss the findings from a prototyping exercise with undergraduate and postgraduate students which took place in stage one at the Universities of Kent and Leeds.

Empathic and Ethical Design of Technology

A generation which relies on constant communication and digital information has a different view point and language use to older generation for whom modes of communication are less constant. How do we convey intangible qualities such as empathy, creativity and ethics to a young technologically literate generation who are comfortable with its use, but who may lack understanding of life experiences of other users? We examine themes emerging from the findings of a study into the ways older people (60+) use technology. The questions guiding our enquiry are as follows: How could learning about social history of technology help bridge the gap between generations and lead to a more empathic design? Can the teaching of empathy and ethical understandings assist this process?