COOP 2012 Workshop: Call for Papers

Fostering Social Interactions in the Ageing Society:
Designing for Inter/Generational Communities

 

Ageing societies call for innovative and sustainable concepts to enable elderly adults to manage their everyday life in a highly self-determined and independent way. Research from different fields, such as CSCW, HCI, and AAL (Ambient Assisted Living), has recognized the challenges for this field, especially in the domain of medical and care oriented support systems. Thus, a lot of innovative systems and products have emerged that aim to support or improve health-related problems in an ageing society. However, what has been somewhat neglected so far, is what we would call the “social side” of health and well-being – and with this a perspective on the socio-technical embedding of assistive and communication technologies. That’s why this workshop takes on a community-oriented perspective to designing ICT for elderly adults.

 

Theme and topics of the workshop

Ageing in place is increasingly emphasised as a preferable alternative to institutional care. Although it offers the potential of both practical and psycho-social benefits, the reality of remaining in the community in later life can prove problematic. A primary concern for this population is the loss of companionship, which can contribute to isolation, depression, and decreased socialization. The best weapon against senior isolation is family contact and inter/generational social interaction, but this is made difficult by living arrangements.

The workshop wishes to explore related potentials but also barriers or specific challenges of ICT to overcome related social needs in the elderly and we therefore encourage researchers to share experiences of their socio-technical design projects with elderly adults.

Among the existing challenges is e.g. a thorough understanding of how relationships are being maintained, as balancing the boundary between autonomy and social inclusion gets harder in higher ages due to physical, mental and social changes in the process of aging. In addition, holding relationships or creating new social interactions for elderly people is strongly contoured by individual and societal norms and values. Another open question is how to deal with an extremely heterogeneous target group in terms of technology affinity and acceptance and individual needs and conducts of life. This points at the need to reflect our recent methodological tool boxes, aimed technical solutions, and research paradigms. Another important strand of inquiry are methodological questions, e.g. how can we achieve the willingness of elderly, technology non-affine people, to get involved in research projects as partners for long-term research?

 

The workshop aims at gathering research on ICT for inter/generational communities from different perspectives:

  • Social/ Interactive TV, also concerned with the design of innovative input devices for elderly persons. Here, the bandwidth is from easy-to-use remote controls over intelligent furniture to other interactive devices in the home, such as interactive picture frames.
  • Social media for social support, such as online communities with special focus on social support for the elderly.
  • Social technologies supporting awareness as well as other technologies such as smart environments, playful interaction technologies as well as games supporting social interaction.

 

Contributions are welcomed on such topics as:

  • Analysis and design of community systems fostering social interactions in an ageing society.
  • Ethnographic studies on people at home in an ageing society.
  • Analysis and design of technology-supported environments at home such as Social TV systems, SmartHomes and SmartFurnitures.
  • Approaches to playful experiences and games for elderly or in inter-generational environments.
  • Design and evaluation of awareness support.
  • Studies on appropriation within communities and home environments.
  • Design of software contributing to formulate virtual inter/generational communities.
  • Living Lab and real-life, longitudinal oriented approaches to designing and evaluating social systems.
  • Usage studies of home-based social media applications by elderly people.

 

Workshop activities, goals and interaction

The workshop is being seen as a challenging place to gather researchers and professionals across different disciplines and research fields who are concerned with the support of social interaction for the aging society.

In order to achieve these goals, we encourage interactions by assigning a discussant to each paper (papers will be shared among participants before the workshop). This discussant will be one of the other authors. The workshop will then start with short presentations. After each talk, the discussant will comment on it, which will give a thesis and an antithesis which will help to start the discussion. The presentations will be gathered by themes. At the end of each theme, there will be a general discussion. In a last workshop sequence, the presentations and topics will be positioned on a common future roadmap and future goals, themes and common activities will be planned and set up.

 

Submissions

Potential participants are requested to submit workshop papers (as either 2 page position papers or 6 page full papers) and short information on the background of the authors (not more than 100 words). Accepted full papers will be published in the International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI).

Participants will be selected on the basis of the quality and relevance of their papers, and the extent (and diversity) of their backgrounds in design to foster an interdisciplinary participation (designers, developers, psychologists, ethnographers, etc.) from both industry and academia. The maximum number of participants is 15.

 

Important Dates

13th March 2012: Submission Deadline

April: Notification of acceptance

3rd May 2012: Camera-Ready Papers due

29th May 2012: Full day Workshop at Marseille, France

 

Submissions should be in DOC or RTF format accompanied by a PDF version based on the IRSI Reports / ECSCW template and should be send to COOP2012-Workshop@fosible.eu

 

Workshop organizers:

Steffen Budweg, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Myriam Lewkowicz, Troyes University of Technology, France

Claudia Mueller, University of Siegen, Germany