Wei Zhao

Community-based social programs play a vital role in helping independently-living older adults to maintain social connectedness. To investigate how technology can support these programs, we co-designed Tangible Topics, a tangible technology aimed at enhancing older adults’ social interactions during program sessions. Through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach with a local community center, this research involved three PAR cycles: (1) a co-design workshop with staff and older adults, (2) iterative co-development of Tangible Topics; and (3) deployment in three program sessions to evaluate its impact. We found that Tangible Topics enriched group interactions by expanding conversation topics, supporting broader participation, and fostering group bonding. It also made conversations more relatable and encouraged a sense of control and shared ownership. Participants suggested improvements and envisioned future applications in social, therapeutic, and educational settings. We discuss design considerations for technologies to create balanced, inclusive, and empowering social program experiences.

Participation in online communities fosters valuable social connectedness for retired adults. However, participation depends on careful facilitation and is sometimes hindered by self-evaluative concerns. In this study, we examine the use of polyadic conversational agents (CAs) - AI systems for multi-party interactions - to support community participation. Using a Wizard of Oz approach, we deployed Xiaozhi, a polyadic CA, into an online gardening community. We evaluated it through observations over three months and 12 semi-structured interviews. Our findings demonstrate diverse roles of Xiaozhi in the community, ranging from domain expert and group mascot to peer member. It provided multidimensional support for participation: 1) lowering cognitive barriers by offering context-aware explanations and prompts; 2) reducing social awkwardness by ensuring guaranteed responses; and 3) encouraging expressions by guiding users to crystallise their ideas. We discuss implications for designing polyadic CAs, including the anthropomorphism paradox, strategic vulnerability, and balancing one-on-one and one-to-many interactions.

We are concurrently witnessing two significant shifts: voice and chat-based conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are becoming ubiquitous (especially more recently due to advances in generative AI and LLMs - large language models), and older people are becoming a very large demographic group (and increasingly adopting of mobile technology on which such interfaces are present). However, despite the recent increase in research activity, age-relevant and inter/cross-generational aspects continue to be underrepresented in both research and commercial product design. Therefore, the overarching aim of this workshop is to increase the momentum for research within the space of hands-free, mobile, and conversational interfaces that centers on age-relevant and inter- and cross-generational interaction. For this, we plan to create an interdisciplinary space that brings together researchers, designers, practitioners, and users, to discuss and share challenges, principles, and strategies for designing such interfaces across the life span. We thus welcome contributions of empirical studies, theories, design, and evaluation of hands-free, mobile, and conversational interfaces designed with aging in mind (e.g. older adults or inter/cross-generational). We particularly encourage contributions focused on leveraging recent advances in generative AI or LLMs. Through this, we aim to grow the community of CUI researchers across disciplinary boundaries (human-computer interaction, voice and language technologies, geronto-technologies, information studies, etc.) that are engaged in the shared goal of ensuring that the aging dimension is appropriately incorporated in mobile / conversational interaction design research.