Susan M. Ferreira

Preliminary findings of an ethnographical research on designing accessible geolocated services with older people

Older people run the risk of being socially excluded due to the numerous barriers they need to overcome when interacting with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to perform an ever-increasing number of daily activities. This paper presents preliminary findings of a rapid ethnographical study, conducted with around 90 older people during 1 month, which aimed to explore the potential of geo-located ICT services to foster social inclusion and support independent living. This paper discusses potential scenarios of use for technologies that have largely been overlooked in HCI research with older people, such as Google Maps; key aspects of how they (want to) use these technologies and relevant interaction barriers that limit their interactions with them.

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.

Going Beyond Telecenters to Foster the Digital Inclusion of Older People in Brazil: Lessons Learned from a Rapid Ethnographical Study

Telecenters take on a prominent role within the current information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem in Brazil. They are seen by a great many as a key means to foster the digital inclusion of the older population in the country. This paper draws upon a rapid ethnographic study conducted with 78 older people in a center that teaches computer classes to seniors in Brazil. The results show that providing older people with technological infrastructures is not enough to strengthen their digital inclusion if their basic and non-instrumental needs are not taken into consideration in defining educational activities to be carried out in public centers. Participants’ basic needs when it comes to interacting with ICT, such as coping with accessibility issues, were dynamic, whilst non-instrumental needs, fulfilled by using these technologies, such as interacting with relevant others, remained fairly constant throughout the study. Drawing on the results of the study, strategies for fostering the digital inclusion and well-being of older people in Brazil that go beyond telecenters are suggested.

Older people’s production and appropriation of digital videos: an ethnographic study

ABSTRACT While most of today’s children, young people, and adults are both consumers and producers of digital content, very little is known about older people as digital content creators. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study, this paper reports on the digital video production and appropriation of approximately 200 older people (aged 60–85). They generated 320 videos over the course of the study. We show their motivations for engaging in digital video production, discuss their planned video making, and highlight their creativity while editing videos. We show the different meanings they ascribed to digital videos in their social appropriation of these objects, the meaningful strategies they adopted to share videos, and the impact on their perceived wellbeing. Furthermore, we outline the solutions the participants developed to overcome or cope with interaction issues they faced over time. We argue that the results portray older people as active and creative makers of digital videos with current video capturing, editing, and sharing technologies. We contend that this portrayal both encourages us to re-consider how older people should be seen within human–computer interaction and helps to frame future research/design activities that bridge the grey digital divide.

Towards iTV services for older people: Exploring their interactions with online video portals in different cultural backgrounds

With a growing ageing population and the advent of interactive TV (iTV), understanding how older people use iTV services is a timely and important task. Working towards this end, this paper reports on in situ conversations of, and observations with, almost 400 older people, with different levels of educational attainment and experience with ICTs, while talking about and using online video portals and similar interactive systems in Spain, Brazil and Denmark. The results show more similarities than differences in their reasons for adopting online video portals and patterns of use. All our participants used these portals for keeping or remaining in touch with people they trusted. The results also show that privacy online was a common concern to all the participants. Differences in the acceptance of e-government services and the type of content that drove most of their interactions were also found. Implications for designing more accessible and meaningful iTV services are discussed.

Co-designing with a community of older learners for over 10 years by moving user-driven participation from the margin to the centre

Abstract This paper addresses a gap in the Participatory Design (PD) literature, wherein more research on the long-term impact of design projects is warranted. This paper reflects on a 10-year study that intertwined ethnography and 2 PD projects in a community of older learners. Although the goal of our study was to design new digital technologies, the process of designing them presented us with opportunities that gave rise to new non-digital practices, which turned out to be the legacy and most significant outcomes of the PD projects. This result invited us to review the trajectory that led to these outcomes. Our analysis shows that the most important legacy aspect of the projects arose from unexpected forms of user—driven participation that we allowed to co-exist together with those practices more related to the design goals of the PD projects. Drawing upon our results, this paper posits that engagement with PD participants that unfolds over an extended period of time is instrumental in facilitating the development of participation, understanding more deeply long-lasting project outcomes, and legitimising forms of participation that are not directly related to project/design goals.

Game Based Learning: A Case Study on Designing an Educational Game for Children in Developing Countries

Despite the efforts and global policies to achieve universal primary education, there are still 58 million children, roughly between the ages of 6 and 11, out of school globally. Although previous studies showed the value of serious games for learning, not enough efforts were made to apply serious games to reduce children illiteracy. Understanding the complexity of this problem, we put together a multidisciplinary research team, and an industrial partner, to work on the design of a serious game for children without access to school. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of our case study, showing the main design challenges faced to develop such tool and proposing solution to overcome those issues. We aim to call the attention of the research community about the urgent need of more studies in this field and we argue that our results could be used as starting point for taking forward future work in this direction.

Towards designing more accessible interactions of older people with digital TV

This paper outlines an ongoing PhD thesis about accessibility, DTV (Digital TV) and older people. We aim to design and evaluate accessible interactions of older people with DTV services enabling communication and access to information about health and wellbeing. DTV opens up a wide range of opportunities for older people to communicate with their social circles and access online information. However, DTV services are far from being accessible to older people. We aim to fill this gap by addressing three relevant and up to now relatively unexplored areas in DTV accessibility research with older people: interaction barriers, everyday use of DTV services enabling communication and access to information about health, and cultural differences in both interaction and use. We will use key ethnographical methods to understand these aspects with two user groups of older people living in developed and developing countries (Spain and Brazil). We will also design and evaluate interactive prototypes of related DTV services by drawing upon the ethnographical data, and involving older people in the design and evaluation (participatory design) process.

Learning in Later Life While Engaging in Cross-Generational Digital Content Creation and Playful Educational Activities

Older people (60+) are using digital technologies in growing numbers. Previous research has pointed out that digital game-based learning has positive effects on learning. Yet, older adults are often portrayed as passive receivers of digital information. Moreover, studies of digital games conducted with them have overlooked learning, focusing almost exclusively on helping older people to cope with age-related changes in functional abilities and improve intergenerational communication. This chapter reports on two case studies, which address digital video creation and digital gameplay in educational activities by older adults with mild-to-moderate age-related changes in functional abilities and different levels of previous experience of ICT use. Both case studies show older people learning more about themselves (i.e., realizing they have the skills to master computers and express themselves through digital technologies) and a number of different topics (ranging from contemporary digital technologies to literature and arts), while actively creating digital content and playing online digital games. The results show the potential of playful learning activities, and the importance of both inter- and intragenerational communication and taking into account older people’s needs and interests, in order to envision a richer and diverse ICT-mediated learning in later life.

Digital Learning Game Scenario: A pedagogical Pattern applied to Serious Game Design

The design of educational Serious Games (SG) remains a difficult operation which requires a tight weave between practices in instructional design and game design to be effective. Despite excellent works in the domain, the balance problem increases more significantly in the mobile learning system development such as Kids Smart Mobile School (KSMS) as a SG. KSMS is a school that aims to provide learning from K to 12 in Math and English as a Second Language to children without access to school in developing countries. This paper proposes a solution by designing a pedagogical pattern of a Learning Game Scenario, based on the educational Montessori approach mixed up with instructional engineering technique. This pattern is applicable to the various learning phases, making up the structure cognitive and pedagogical of KSMS. Moreover, this paper indicates how this pedagogical pattern makes easier the communication between members of an interdisciplinary team in different phases of design and development.