Hello and welcome back. Today, we have a very special video for you. We're going to be talking about designing for older adults and we're actually going to have an interview with Professor Anne Marie Piper who's an expert in the field. Now, this extends this theme of universal design that you've been hearing a lot in all of our videos and I just want to emphasize that thinking about how your design will work for people of diverse abilities. In this case, all sorts of ages is time well-spent. Now older adults, this is one demographic that we'll all be part of some day if we're lucky. So, it's an important one to consider. So let me introduce Professor Anne Marie Piper, she's an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. Her work is in Communication Studies, though she also has appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Communication Sciences and Disorders. She directs the inclusive technology lab. And recently, she has received the very prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award for advancing online social support for older adults with disabilities. Her work has received best paper rewards and honorable mentions at all the major venues in our field, such as CHI and DIS and ASSETS and it's just an honor to have her with us today. So, let's go ahead and call her in. So, welcome and thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. So, we're going to be talking about design for older adults and my first question is what term should you use to refer to this population? I've heard people say, elders. I've heard people say, old people. I probably shouldn't use old people. I've heard people say, ancient ones. That's probably not the right way, either. What's the right term? >> That's a great question and one we get quite often. In my experience, the most appropriate term is old adult. It helps emphasize the relative nature of age. We're all older than some people and younger than others, but terminology is also cultural. So, I would really recommend to students that they ask the older adults that they're working with what sorts of terms they use to describe themselves. And so in HCI, we often rely on the World Health Organization's definition of what it means to be an older adult and this is often defined by the chronological age of 65 and sometimes 60. But again, this definition can vary based on regions and different countries. So, another issue is that being an older adult is based on your values and your own perspectives. So I've worked with people in their 60s who very much identify as being an older adult and consider themselves old, then I've met centenarians who explain that being old is a frame of mind. And one memorable individual who was 101, who lived on her own, who kept her own house. We still cook our own meals said that many of her younger peers are old and she didn't think that term applied to her. So really, being older is far more than chronological age. >> That's very interesting. So, it sounds like you've done a lot of work with this population. Could you tell us a little bit more about your research? >> Sure. So, one issue for studying is what it means to stay active and engaged online throughout the lifespan? So often, older adults are thought of as passive participants online. They're lurking, but not often contributing content. And so to turn this on its head, we studied a community of very active older adult bloggers and we've found that blogging and contributing content online was really important for this stage of life. For example, we've found that these older individuals were negotiating their identity as they entered retirement. So often, people are leaving very meaningful work that they had for and now contributing content online can derive a sense of self-worth. People are also negotiating different transitions around having an occupation that defined themselves and now caring for grandchildren. And so, blogging is a space where people can work through some of these identity related transitions. And then finally, the older adult bloggers are also expanding their networks to new peer groups. We often think about older adult as the time where we just turn inward and we just want to stay close to those we already know, but that's not characteristic of the full experience of older adulthood. People are often looking for new peers and new relationships. So in a second line of work, we're also studying how family members and other caregivers can help older people stay active online throughout their lives. And so, I think we're at a pretty pivotal point in history now where it's less important to design technologies that help people go online for the first time and it's becoming much more important to design technologies that help people sustain their online lives as they age. So for example, what happens for older individuals who experience cognitive impairment later in life? So we've been studying and investigating the ways that caregivers help older people stay active, and engaged online. For example, caregivers of older adults with cognitive impairments are using the internet as a way of helping people stay socially connected and helping people say stimulated, but caregivers are also doing things that infringe on their independence. They're filtering certain content from their care recipients. They're blocking certain friends in someone's social network. So there's this tension between staying active and engaged, and empowering way versus infringing on someone's own independence. >> Well, that sounds really interesting. So right now, we have an audience of people. A lot of them are computer scientists who want to learn how to design better user interfaces and what are somethings I should keep in mind when working with this population? >> Sure, another excellent question. So in HCI, we often design with the goal of helping older people do things like remember their medications or to prevent wandering behavior for someone with dementia or to stay socially connected. But in essence, we're really problematizing aging as something that we can solve through technology and this puts growing older in a fairly negative light. So, this view of aging is also further perpetuated by the notion of successful aging. So this is the idea that as we grow older, we need to stay physically active. We need to be social. We need to always be sharpening our minds by doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles. This means that if you're not doing these activities, you might be aging the wrong way. So, it's excluding very real and personal experiences for some older adults who may not be able to or may not have the resources for doing some of these activities. So, one piece of advice for students is to try to view older adulthood as a time of development and growth. We want to look for opportunities around how people are expressing themselves and using technology to meet their changing needs as they age, as they experience what it's like to become older and to have an identity as an older adult. So, there are many aspects of older adulthood that I feel the field of HCI hasn't fully explored. So most recently, we've been studying Issues of ageism through technology design and this involves the pervasive nature of stigma and bias around aging in the media. So everywhere we look, we see things like anti-aging cream that treats growing older as something that's very negative. We may have trouble getting out of a chair and we say, my bad hurts. I'm just getting old. And so it's one view of what it means to be older and it's often harmful, and just discouraging for people that are in older adulthood. Another issue that we have uncovered through our work is the topic of age discrimination in the workplace, particularly around technology use. And so, some of the older adult workplace say that this begins around age 50. And so, this is a huge area of opportunity for HCI design. And then finally, so much of what we've been working on in the field involves helping people stay connected with their family members and close friends. But the older adults we've worked with have said other things like supporting intimate relationships throughout the lifespan, and encouraging new forms of partnerships, like finding new roommates as you get older. So, these are things that aren't even on our radar in the field of HCI, but they're very important for older individuals. >> That's so interesting. And even as you're speaking, I'm hearing a lot of the same themes that have come up in my work with teenagers, for example. Rediscovering identity, figuring out who you are, figuring out what it means for you to be in this stage of your life. I think this is kind of getting back to the theme that we've had in this course is the theme of universal design. If you're thinking about lots of different populations, then your design can actually be better. So, how can taking these considerations that you've said actually improve people's designs? >> Sure, I think with any population, we want to be very mindful of the assumptions we're making that we bring into our design work. So, we need to be mindful of the power dynamics that are at play as well and that we might reinforce through our design process, such as identifying certain issues as problems that we want to address while marginalizing other issues. And we can also inadvertently position the user as needing help and us as the researchers or the designers as the ones in a position of power to make that change happen. So instead, I think we really need to be reflective on these issues and seek new ways to empower older adults themselves to be capable and competent creators of technology. >> That's so great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great to chat with you and I'm sure the students learned a lot. Thank you. >> Thank you.
