John Vines

The rapid platformization of food delivery for the ageing population presents a critical tension: while supporting ageing in place and combating high rates of food insecurity, automated services risk reducing the vital practice of food preparation – a core site of self-care and agency – to transactional logistics driven by algorithms that favour efficiency and standardization over lived experience. This article explores how food platforms can promote care, agency and emotional engagement through a Research-through-Design study, Playing the Platform . In this two-month embodied role-play, the lead researcher performed the service in participants’ homes, leveraging play, surprise and improvisation to address three research questions: how do home meal delivery platforms intersect with the physical, spatial and material realities of older adults’ domestic environments? How do home meal delivery platforms reshape older adults’ self-care and caregiving practices? How might play and surprise surface emotional, relational and material dimensions of food in later life that are often obscured by platform logistics of efficiency? Findings demonstrate that this playful approach fosters reciprocity and agency, generating rich insights into the physical, emotional and relational dimensions of cooking in later life. Crucially, small moments of surprise – unexpected ingredients or collaborative cooking decisions – transform routine food provision into meaningful events. These insights reveal how home meal delivery platforms can move beyond efficiency to support older adults’ autonomy, well-being and connection, offering design directions for integrating playful and meaningful interactions into essential care services.

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a life-threatening emergency, and the prompt use of public access defibrillators (PADs) can significantly increase chances of survival. Drawing on 19 interviews with PAD guardians and key stakeholders, this paper investigates how PAD infrastructure is sustained in practice. We focus on the essential but often invisible labour carried out by PAD guardians in Scotland to ensure these lifesaving devices remain functional and accessible throughout their lifecycle. Our findings reveal that PAD infrastructure is fragile, prone to breakdowns, and reliant on ongoing collaborative practices of maintenance, repair, and care. We conceptualise PAD guardianship as a form of care work: relational, material, affective, and ethically charged. Importantly, we draw attention to the conditions under which this work is performed, arguing that caring for infrastructure necessarily includes caring for the people who sustain them. To move towards more resilient PAD infrastructures, we advocate reimagining guardianship as a collective practice, supported by systems explicitly designed with and for care – of devices, data, and the human networks that underpin effective emergency response.

Prior research has raised concerns about students' over-reliance on large language models (LLMs) in higher education. This paper examines how Computer Science students and instructors engage with LLMs across five scenarios: "Writing", "Quiz", "Programming", "Project-based learning", and "Information retrieval". Through user studies with 16 students and 8 instructors, we identify 7 key intents, including increasingly complex student practices. Findings reveal varying levels of conflict between student practices and instructor norms, ranging from clear conflict in "Writing-generation" and "(Programming) quiz-solving", through partial conflict in "Programming project-implementation" and "Project-based learning", to broad agreement in "Writing-revision \& ideation", "(Programming) quiz-correction" and "Info-query \& summary". We document instructors are shifting from prohibiting to recognizing students' use of LLMs for high-quality work, integrating usage records into assessment grading. Finally, we propose LLM design guidelines: deploying default guardrails with game-like and empathetic interaction to prevent students from "deserting" LLMs, especially for "Writing-generation", while utilizing comprehension checks in low-conflict intents to promote learning.