Making online participatory design work: Understanding the digital ecologies of older adults

Abstract

Participatory design (PD) is a meaningful approach to involve older adults into design; however, currently we lack understanding how to do such work online. In our paper, we report from a study where we organized 19 PD workshops online with older adults. We argue that to do so in a meaningful way, a mutually shaped understanding of older adults’ digital ecologies is at the core of organizing such PD processes. We present an empirical account of how digital ecologies of our older participants have become an issue to tackle in the online PD workshops. Further, we provide a solution, a mapping technique, and report from our efforts to evaluate it, that should help to overcome the situation when digital ecologies become a problem in PD online.