Not Just a Number: A Multidimensional Approach to Ageing in HCI

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how age is conceptualized in HCI research, proposing a multidimensional typology to better understand older adults and address the digital divide through a social constructivist lens.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multidimensional typology of age in HCI, emphasizing the need for a more critical and reflexive approach to age-related design and research.

Findings

Existing HCI research lacks explicit focus on age as a social construct

The typology reveals diverse ways age is interpreted in HCI studies

Highlights the importance of a social constructivist approach to age in HCI

Abstract

The focus on managing problems that can arise for older adults has meant that extant HCI and Ageing research has not given the concepts of 'age' and 'ageing' the explicit theoretical attention they deserve. Attending to this gap, we critically examine a ten-year corpus of CHI publications through the lens of an existing typology which we have further developed to analyse how age is understood, interpreted and constructed in the field of HCI. Our resulting multidimensional typology of age in HCI elucidates the distinctive characteristics of older adults considered when designing with and for this user group, but also highlights the need for a more critical, reflexive, social constructivist approach to age in HCI. Applying this approach, we explore age as a multidimensional system of stratification to better understand the phenomenon of the age-based digital divide.