Pooja Upadhyay

Till date, research on technology design to support aging has largely adopted human-centered approaches, such as user-centered and participatory design. While this body of work continues to yield insights on technologies for older individuals, recent research is beginning to question whether other ways of knowing, that are not solely “humanistic”, can yield new understandings on technologies for aging. We pick up this call, and present emerging findings from our interviews with older adults around their use of home-based intelligent voice assistants. Building upon these findings, we discuss how attuning to the nonhuman agency and the larger material world can offer new insights on technology design for aging, such as, speak to issues of technology non-use by older adults. We discuss implications of assigning responsibility and accountability beyond older adults to nonhuman actors and how it can speak to the deficit-centered narrative that often gets associated with aging.

Conversational voice assistants are often imbued with personality and human-like characteristics (e.g., gender). While researchers have begun to examine and design for the downstream societal impacts of voice assistants encoding characteristics such as gender, we know little about other human-like characteristics such as age that are encoded in an artificial, yet, anthropomorphic voice. As older adults continue to adopt voice assistants, we brought older adults into an activity to customize human-like characteristics for their voice assistant. Our findings reveal the different stereotypes and assumptions individuals associated with voice assistant characteristics (e.g., age, gender, race). We also describe individuals' motivations behind customizing or not customizing these characteristics. We discuss how biases get encoded through our design process, marginalizing older adults and other non-dominant user groups and call for a need to examine the systemic, yet unspoken, power structures encoded in anthropomorphic technologies.

Introduction. Emerging technologies like intelligent voice assistants or social robots can shape human relations with the world. To illustrate how an emerging technology mediates relations and shapes social practices in the context of aging, we present findings on use of voice assistants by older adults. Method. We analysed interviews with 24 older adults by adopting a post-phenomenological perspective to examine how an emerging technology actively mediates relations between older individuals and their larger social world. Results. Our findings surface the different types of relations that voice assistants mediate between older adults and their larger social world, unpacking how these relations shape social practices around what it means to give company to pets, to live alone, or to give and receive care. Discussion. We discuss implications for understanding the mutually constitutive relations between older adults and the emerging technologies they use and opportunities in designing to support neglected relations, and accounting for nonhuman actors in technology and aging research. Conclusion. We provide a preliminary understanding on how an emerging technology shapes social practices in later life. This understanding is crucial for aging and technology research, as several emerging technologies (e.g., social robots) target older adults, yet little is known about the relationships and discursive practices that shape their use.

The field of HCI has welcomed diverse groups of researchers from various disciplines, and has adapted its knowledge production in response, such as via the incorporation of new theoretical and methodological approaches over time. Researchers' positionality seems to be an important aspect of the quality of scholarship and nature of knowledge production in a field. Through this Special Interest Group meeting, we aim to bring together a diverse set of scholars who may politically identify with a "global south", to discuss our positionality, and collective contributions to shaping knowledge production in HCI. Researchers identifying with the global south may have similar heritages, colonial and developmental histories. We are participating in an institution of science that has been historically uneven in terms of considering our contexts, as well as participation of researchers from our contexts in knowledge production. Through this collective discussion, we can attempt to understand how our positionality affects the way we "think" about research problems, and "do" our research. This may involve not only complex aspects of our identities, but also the resources we have access to, and the tangible methodological strategies we may adopt in research projects.

Visual online communities can present accessibility challenges to older adults or people with vision and motor disabilities. Motivated by this challenge, accessibility and HCI researchers have called for voice-based communities to support aging and disability. This paper extends prior work on voice community design and short-term use by providing empirical data on how people interact with voice communities over time and intentional instances of non-use. We conducted a one-year study with 43 blind and low vision older adults, of whom 21 used a voice-based community. We use vignettes to unpack five different voice community member roles - the obligatory poster, routine poster, cross-platform lurker, busy socialite, and visual expertise seeker - and discuss community interactions over time. Findings show how participation varied based on engagement in other communities and ways that participants sought interaction. We discuss (1) how to design voice communities for member roles and (2) the implications of synchronous and asynchronous voice community interaction in voice-only communities.

While past research has examined older adults’ voice assistant (VA) use, it is unclear whether VAs provide enough value to sustain use when compared to technologies such as smartphones. Research also suggests that barriers around structured command input may limit use. In order to investigate these gaps in adoption, we conducted interviews with ten older adults in a long-term care community who have adopted Alexa devices for at least one year. Participants learned to use Alexa through a training program that encouraged exploration. They used Alexa to complement their daily routines, improve their mood, engage in cognitively stimulating activities, and support socialization with others. We discuss our findings in the context of prior work, describe strategies to promote VA learning and adoption, and present design recommendations to support aging.