TY - GEN
T1 - Towards Accounting for Nonhuman Agency in Technology Design for Aging
AU - Pradhan, Alisha
AU - Chopra, Shaan
AU - Upadhyay, Pooja
AU - Brewer, Robin
AU - Lazar, Amanda
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/7/17
Y1 - 2025/7/17
N2 - Till date, research on technology design to support aging has largely adopted human-centered approaches, such as user-centered and participatory design. While this body of work continues to yield insights on technologies for older individuals, recent research is beginning to question whether other ways of knowing, that are not solely "humanistic", can yield new understandings on technologies for aging. We pick up this call, and present emerging findings from our interviews with older adults around their use of home-based intelligent voice assistants. Building upon these findings, we discuss how attuning to the nonhuman agency and the larger material world can offer new insights on technology design for aging, such as, speak to issues of technology non-use by older adults. We discuss implications of assigning responsibility and accountability beyond older adults to nonhuman actors and how it can speak to the deficit-centered narrative that often gets associated with aging.
AB - Till date, research on technology design to support aging has largely adopted human-centered approaches, such as user-centered and participatory design. While this body of work continues to yield insights on technologies for older individuals, recent research is beginning to question whether other ways of knowing, that are not solely "humanistic", can yield new understandings on technologies for aging. We pick up this call, and present emerging findings from our interviews with older adults around their use of home-based intelligent voice assistants. Building upon these findings, we discuss how attuning to the nonhuman agency and the larger material world can offer new insights on technology design for aging, such as, speak to issues of technology non-use by older adults. We discuss implications of assigning responsibility and accountability beyond older adults to nonhuman actors and how it can speak to the deficit-centered narrative that often gets associated with aging.
KW - Nonhuman agency
KW - Older adults
KW - Posthumanism
KW - Voice assistants
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105013072658
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105013072658#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3733155.3733205
DO - 10.1145/3733155.3733205
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105013072658
T3 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, PETRA 2025
SP - 273
EP - 276
BT - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, PETRA 2025
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 18th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, PETRA 2025
Y2 - 25 June 2025 through 27 June 2025
ER -