This project involves a two-phase Participatory Action Research (PAR) collaboration with a local community centre in Australia to explore how technologies can be designed and deployed to enrich older adults’ social interaction in community-based programs, such as tea-time group gatherings. Through sustained engagement with older adults, organisational staff, and everyday community contexts, the project co-created Tangible Topics, a technology prototype designed to prompt and enrich shared social interactions during program sessions. The research draws on a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, field observations, co-design workshops, iterative prototyping, and field trials, to examine both the design process and the situated use of the technology in practice. 

Outcomes from the first phase of this project were published as a full paper at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2024, where the work received a Best Paper Honourable Mention Award (top 5% of submissions). [Paper link]

This project was undertaken in collaboration with Dossy.Co (a video calling application startup), Uniting AgeWell Ltd (a local aged care provider), and Ageing with Grace (a community organisation) as part of a University of Melbourne research team to investigate how video calling technologies can be better designed to support older adults living independently. Although widely adopted commercial video calling platforms such as Zoom are increasingly used for everyday communication, they are not tailored to the specific needs and capabilities of many older adults. Through a field trial evaluating Dossy, a video calling application designed with older adults’ actual needs in mind, the project examined participants’ lived experiences of technology use and generated design insights to inform future video calling applications aimed at enhancing social connectedness in later life. [View Project Details]