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

Published: 16 August 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
DIS '10: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
August 2010
457 pages
ISBN:9781450301039
DOI:10.1145/1858171
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 16 August 2010

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  1. design
  2. digital economy
  3. inclusion
  4. older adults
  5. technology acceptance

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  • (2024)Intersecting Liminality: Acquiring a Smartphone as a Blind or Low Vision Older AdultProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675622(1-14)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Voice Assistants for Mental Health Services: Designing Dialogues with Homebound Older AdultsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661536(844-858)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Ageing and TechnologyIndia's Silver Surfers10.1007/978-3-031-71194-7_2(19-35)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Older Adults´ Emotional User Experiences with Digital Health ServicesDigital Health and Wireless Solutions10.1007/978-3-031-59080-1_10(131-146)Online publication date: 5-May-2024
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