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Researchers support race, gender, and age diverse groups of people to create with maker electronics. These groups include older adults, who are often overlooked as not interested or capable of learning new technologies due to ageist stereotypes. One approach, often involving e-textiles, leverages crafting as a bridge to broaden participation in making. We investigated ways to broaden participation in maker electronics for older adults by remotely co-designing e-textile projects with 6 older adult crafters over the course of 5 workshop sessions for a total of 45 hours. We developed a deeper understanding of their practices, identifying a Planner-Improviser Spectrum for how they approached their craft, and created medium fdelity prototypes. Our design implications draw on our participants’ crafting experience and their experience in the workshop to highlight what e-textile toolkit designers can learn from skilled older adult crafters, such as selecting familiar materials, supporting aesthetic goals, and making electronics more attainable. 

Speech and voice interaction is often hailed as a natural form of interaction and thus more inclusive for a larger portion of users. But, how accurate is this claim? In this panel, we challenge existing assumptions that voice and speech interaction is inclusive of diverse users. The goal of this panel is to bring together the broad HCI community to discuss the state of voice interaction for marginalized and vulnerable populations, how inclusive design is considered (or neglected) in current voice interaction design practice, and how to move forward when it comes to designing voice interaction for inclusion and diversity. In particular, we plan to center the discussion on older adults as a representative group of digitally-marginalized populations, especially given that voice interfaces are marketed towards this group, yet often fail to properly include this population in the design of such interfaces. 

Researchers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) have long developed technologies for older adults. Recently, researchers are engaging in critical reflections of these approaches. IoT for aging in place is one area around which these conflicting discourses have converged, likely in part driven by government and industry interest. This article introduces diffractive analysis as an approach that examines difference to yield new empirical understandings about our methods and the topics we study. We constructed three analyses of a dataset collected at an IoT design workshop and then conducted a diffractive analysis. We present themes from this analysis regarding the ways that participants are inscribed in our research, considerations related to transferability and novelty between work centered on older adults and other work, and insights about methodologies. Our discussion contributes implications for researchers to form teams and account for their roles in research, as well as recommendations how diffractive analysis can support other research agendas. 

Conversational agents designed to interact through natural language are often imbued with human-like personalities. At times, the agent might also have a distinct persona with traits such as gender, age, or a backstory. Designing such personality or persona for conversational agents has become a common design practice. In this work, we review the emerging literature on designing agent persona or personality, and reflect on these approaches, along with the personas that are created for common conversational agents. We discuss open questions with regards to three aspects: meeting user needs, the ethics of deception, and reinforcing social stereotypes through conversational agents. We hope this work can provoke researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on their approach for designing personality or persona of conversational agents. 

Makerspaces are being introduced in a wide variety of settings, including community settings such as schools and libraries. Older adults are one group for whom making agendas are being pursued, with envisioned outcomes such as supporting agency and well-being. However, research on making and DIY with older adults typically study individuals who are already engaged in making practices or bring individuals in to a technology environment that has already been created. In this paper, we study the older adult-driven formation of a makerspace in an independent living community. Through an ethnographically-informed approach, we studied the ways that individuals considered appropriate allocation of resources towards a makerspace, scoped activities, evaluated goals, and made trade-offs. Our analysis is centered around describing the way that this makerspace formed as well as three ways that individuals made sense of the makerspace as the planning unfolded: the openness of a space that promises to cater to interests of the population; the promise of a makerspace to involve more residents in technology, but the need to obscure the technology to make it appealing; and a valuation of the return on investment for limited financial and space resources. Our discussion contributes to supporting and studying early adoption of technology by older adults, complicates visions of “making for all,” and presents considerations regarding the often under-specified community of a makerspace. 

Technology has the opportunity to assist older adults as they age in place, coordinate caregiving resources, and meet unmet needs through access to resources. Currently, older adults use consumer technologies to support everyday life, however these technologies are not always accessible or as useful as they can be. Indeed, industry has attempted to create smart home technologies (e.g., Microsoft HomeOS, Intel CareNet) with older adults as a target user group, however these solutions are oftenmore focused on the technical aspects and are short lived. In this paper, we advocate for older adults being involved in the design process - from initial ideation to product development to deployment. We encourage federally funded researchers and industry to create compensated, diverse older adult advisory boards to address stereotypes about aging while ensuring their needs are considered. We envision artificial intelligence (AI) systems that augment resources instead of replacing them - especially in under-resourced communities. Older adults rely on their caregiver networks and community organizations for social, emotional, and physical support; thus, AI should be used to coordinate resources better and lower the burden of connecting with these resources. Although sociotechnical smart systems can help identify needs of older adults, the lack of affordable research infrastructure and translation of findings into consumer technology perpetuates inequities in designing for diverse older adults. In addition, there is a disconnect between the creation of smart sensing systems and creating understandable, actionable data for older adults and caregivers to utilize. We ultimately advocate for a well-coordinated research effort across the United States that connects older adults, caregivers, community organizations, and researchers together to catalyze innovative and practical research for all stakeholders. 

Voice assistants embodied in smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo, Google Home) enable voice-based interaction that does not necessarily rely on expertise with mobile or desktop computing. Hence, these voice assistants offer new opportunities to different populations, including individuals who are not interested or able to use traditional computing devices such as computers and smartphones. To understand how older adults who use technology infrequently perceive and use these voice assistants, we conducted a 3-week field deployment of the Amazon Echo Dot in the homes of seven older adults. While some types of usage dropped over the 3-week period (e.g., playing music), we observed consistent usage for finding online information. Given that much of this information was health-related, this finding emphasizes the need to revisit concerns about credibility of information with this new interaction medium. Although features to support memory (e.g., setting timers, reminders) were initially perceived as useful, the actual usage was unexpectedly low due to reliability concerns. We discuss how these findings apply to other user groups along with design implications and recommendations for future work on voice-user interfaces. 

Educators have been working towards creating a more diverse computing community by engaging people in designing with computing technology. We present a Teachable Moment demonstration of paper circuits — one hands-on activity to engage people in learning about and designing with electronic circuits. Paper circuits is a fast, inexpensive introduction to circuits, that has the flexibility to also be used for interactive prototypes or Wizard-of-Oz. To this end, we describe a basic paper circuits activity in detail and suggest how paper circuits could be used as a prototyping design tool for HCI educators. 

As the worldwide population ages, HCI researchers are designing technologies to better support older adults. We investigated how older adult crafters would customize technologies using electronics by building on their crafting skills. This supported them to explore customizing devices for themselves and advance the design of per- vasive health technologies for older adults. We first conducted a survey of 42 older adult crafters to learn more about their crafting habits and gauge interest in technology and health tracking. We then conducted a participatory design workshop with 10 older adult crafters, focused on mutual learning to support them in prototyp- ing how they would customize technology with maker electronics. They brainstormed customized devices around health, games, and safety, as well as aesthetically enhanced artifacts integrating elec- tronics. We discuss how promoting older adult crafters to design and build customized pervasive health technologies impacts future research, and we provide guidelines on how to do so.