Hope to Die Before You Get Old?

Abstract This ongoing experience of a collaborative project to develop virtual services for older people is outlined. A key feature is an objective of making users more central to the system development process. The idea of appropriation through co-production to enable ‘design in use’ is proposed. This is presented as an alternative to dominant techno-centric approaches and as potentially more effective than participative design in mitigating its consequences. The experience to date of intervention nurture and facilitating co-production in the project is outlined and discussed. It is suggested that this approach can avoid problems of ‘over-integration’– a consequence of many attempts to provide more joined-up public services by virtual means.

[1]  Richard Heeks.  e-Government as a Carrier of Context , 2005, Journal of Public Policy.

[2]  Mark Blythe,et al.  Socially dependable design: The challenge of ageing populations for HCI , 2005, Interact. Comput..

[3]  James Stewart,et al.  Social Learning in Technological Innovation: Experimenting with Information and Communication Technologies , 2005 .

[4]  Robin Williams,et al.  The Wrong Trousers? Beyond the Design Fallacy: Social Learning and the User , 2005 .

[5]  D. Crawford.  Introduction , 2008, CACM.

[6]  N. Oudshoorn,et al.  How Users Matter. The Co-construction of Technologies and Users , 2003 .

[7]  Carl May,et al.  Making and Unmaking Telepatients , 2009 .

[8]  A. Webster.  Information and communications technologies and health care: User-centred devices and patient work , 2009 .

[9]  Philippe Rouchy,et al.  Co-Realisation: Towards a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design , 2002, Scand. J. Inf. Syst..

[10]  B. J. Taylor,et al.  Designing dependable assistive technology systems for vulnerable people , 2002 .

[11]  Richard Badham,et al.  Tinkering with technology: Human factors, work redesign, and professionals in workplace innovation , 2000 .

[12]  Catherine Needham.  Realising the Potential of Co-production: Negotiating Improvements in Public Services , 2008, Social Policy and Society.

[13]  J. Law.  A Sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology, and domination , 1991 .

[14]  S. Woolgar.  Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials , 1990 .

[15]  Carl May,et al.  Factors affecting the adoption of telehealthcare in the United Kingdom: the policy context and the problem of evidence , 2001 .

[16]  I. Hutchby.  Technologies, Texts and Affordances , 2001 .

[17]  Gill Whitney,et al.  Active aging through universal design , 2006 .

[18]  Trevor Pinch,et al.  How users matter : The co-construction of users and technologies , 2003 .