Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study

Abstract

Background Participatory Design (PD), albeit an established approach in User-Centered Design, comes with specific challenges when working with older adults as research participants. Addressing these challenges relates to the reflection and negotiation of the positionalities of the researchers and research participants and includes various acts of giving and receiving help. During the COVID-19 pandemic, facets of positionalities and (mutual) care became particularly evident in qualitative and participatory research settings. Objective The aim of this paper was to systematically analyze care practices of participatory (design) research, which are to different extents practices of the latter. Using a multiyear PD project with older people that had to take place remotely over many months, we specify different practices of care; how they relate to collaborative work in the design project; and represent foundational practices for sustainable, long-term co-design. Our research questions were “How can digitally-mediated PD work during COVID-19 and can we understand such digital PD as ‘care’?” Methods Our data comes from the Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives” (JPI MYBL), a European Union project that aims to promote digital literacy and technology appropriation among older adults in domestic settings. It targeted the cocreation, by older adults and university researchers, of a mobile demo kit website with cocreated resources, aimed at improving the understanding of use options of digital tools. Through a series of workshops, a range of current IT products was explored by a group of 21 older adults, which served as the basis for joint cocreative work on generating design ideas and prototypes. We reflect on the PD process and examine how the actors enact and manifest care. Results The use of digital technology allowed the participatory project to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic and accentuated the digital skills of older adults and the improvement of digital literacy as part of “care.” We provide empirically based evidence of PD with older adults developing digital literacy and sensitizing concepts, based on the notion of care by Tronto for differentiating aspects and processes of care. The data suggest that it is not enough to focus solely on the technologies and how they are used; it is also necessary to focus on the social structures in which help is available and in which technologies offer opportunities to do care work. Conclusions We document that the cocreation of different digital media tools can be used to provide a community with mutual care. Our study demonstrates how research participants effectively enact different forms of care and how such “care” is a necessary basis for a genuinely participatory approach, which became especially meaningful as a form of support during COVID-19. We reflect on how notions of “care” and “caring” that were central to the pandemic response are also central to PD.

Barriers and facilitators to acceptance and implementation of eMental-health intervention among older adults: A qualitative systematic review

“…Co-design and human-centered design are practical solutions to improve the user experience by including older users in the research process, respecting their psychophysiological needs, and focusing on their behavioral and personality traits. 54 , 55 Per our results, all studies mention that EMHIs must also include supportive training and consistent external assistance to alleviate technical barriers. Supportive training equips older persons with the necessary skills, and constant external help provides continuous support to meet any challenges that may arise.…”

Prototyping with purpose: Increasing participatory design with malleable interactive prototypes

“…Queiros et al (2023, p. 513) conclude that the prototype, which could only be navigated, did not allow the users to fully experience the use, and that "artifacts need to be more interactive in order to give a more realistic experience" of the future use and interaction. Bodini et al (2024) provide some valuable points about conducting workshops over distance, as does Paluch et al (2023) with their exploration of care in PD processes conducted over distance with elderly. Dew et al's (2024) study involved people over distance in co-design, but none of the three above-mentioned studies focus on collaborative design of IT systems, so they will not be expounded on further here.…”