Graeme W. Coleman

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.

On the Conceptualization, Design, and Evaluation of Appealing, Meaningful, and Playable Digital Games for Older People:

While older people tend to be regarded as actual, or potential, players of digital games within literature on game studies, human–computer interaction, and gerontechnology, they are also often considered nonavid users of digital technologies. This contradiction prompted us to conduct a literature review, which revealed (a) insufficient involvement of older people within the design of games targeted toward this group and (b) insufficient understanding of their everyday digital gameplay. In this article, we present the conceptualization, design, and evaluation of digital games that active older people found to be sufficiently appealing, playable, and meaningful. A 6-month ethnography of the play experiences of 170 older people helped us to conceptualize these games, which were codesigned through playful everyday activities. To facilitate the development of these games, we designed and evaluated an online game creation platform, which enabled 99 older people with different cultural backgrounds to create, play, and contribute to games.

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.

Twasebook: a "crowdsourced phrasebook" for language learners using Twitter

We present Twasebook, a web application aimed at learners of foreign languages. Based on a learners search terms, Twasebook identifies relevant status updates from Twitter in the learners target language(s) as examples of everyday vocabulary. Twasebook therefore represents a proof of concept application designed to explore the feasibility of utilizing the vast amounts of open content generated by social networking tools within the context of language learning. In this paper, we present the motivation behind Twasebook, a brief description of how the application works, and our plans for future development.

Listen to this: using ethnography to inform the design of auditory interfaces

Within the wider Human-Computer Interaction community, many researchers have turned to ethnography to inform systems design. However, such approaches have yet to be fully utilized within auditory interface research, a field hitherto driven by technology-inspired design work and the addressing of specific cognitive issues. It is proposed that the time has come to investigate the role ethnographic methods have to play within auditory interface design. We begin by discussing “traditional” ethnographic methods by presenting our experiences conducting a field study with a major UK-based computer games developer, highlighting issues pertinent to the design of auditory interfaces, before suggesting ways in which such techniques could be expanded to consider the role sound plays in peoples lived experiences and thus merit further research.