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Age and experience: ludic engagement in a residential care setting

This double-blind refereed paper describes field-work and prototype development in a residential care home over a two-year period. Surveys of the UK, Europe and America indicate that older people fear going into care more than they fear death. This causes anxiety not only for older people themselves but also their family and carers. Most of the work which addresses ageing populations and care homes in particular focus on the work of carers and aims to improve task efficiency. Though laudable, such work neglects quality-of-life for residents. This paper describes work which aimed to create enjoyable or ludic experiences. It describes four technological interventions: “video window”, “projected portraiture”, “blank canvas”, and “soundscape radio”. These interventions repositioned ‘off the shelf’ technologies to provide a space for cross-generational engagement. “Blank Canvas” featured a framed blank canvas in the sitting room where flickr searches directed by residents were displayed with a projector. This informed the development of The PhotoStroller a device Blythe et al developed to enable residents themselves to search flickr using a simple dial-based controller to select categories of search and a slider to vary the relevance of results. The Photostroller has been used by successive care homes and is currently in use at a Joseph Rowntreee Foundation home.

The Designing Interactive Systems Conference is the premier international arena for interaction design and the acceptance rate for this year was just 24%, the paper has already been cited 7 times (google scholar) and downloaded from the ACM digital library 250 times.