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Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study

BACKGROUND: Participatory Design (PD), albeit an established approach in User-Centered Design, comes with specific challenges when working with older adults as research participants. Addressing these challenges relates to the reflection and negotiation of the positionalities of the researchers and r...

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Autores principales: Paluch, Richard, Cerna, Katerina, Kirschsieper, Dennis, Müller, Claudia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: JMIR Publications 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10390970/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37459177
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/45750
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author Paluch, Richard
Cerna, Katerina
Kirschsieper, Dennis
Müller, Claudia
author_facet Paluch, Richard
Cerna, Katerina
Kirschsieper, Dennis
Müller, Claudia
author_sort Paluch, Richard
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Participatory Design (PD), albeit an established approach in User-Centered Design, comes with specific challenges when working with older adults as research participants. Addressing these challenges relates to the reflection and negotiation of the positionalities of the researchers and research participants and includes various acts of giving and receiving help. During the COVID-19 pandemic, facets of positionalities and (mutual) care became particularly evident in qualitative and participatory research settings. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper was to systematically analyze care practices of participatory (design) research, which are to different extents practices of the latter. Using a multiyear PD project with older people that had to take place remotely over many months, we specify different practices of care; how they relate to collaborative work in the design project; and represent foundational practices for sustainable, long-term co-design. Our research questions were “How can digitally-mediated PD work during COVID-19 and can we understand such digital PD as ‘care’?” METHODS: Our data comes from the Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives” (JPI MYBL), a European Union project that aims to promote digital literacy and technology appropriation among older adults in domestic settings. It targeted the cocreation, by older adults and university researchers, of a mobile demo kit website with cocreated resources, aimed at improving the understanding of use options of digital tools. Through a series of workshops, a range of current IT products was explored by a group of 21 older adults, which served as the basis for joint cocreative work on generating design ideas and prototypes. We reflect on the PD process and examine how the actors enact and manifest care. RESULTS: The use of digital technology allowed the participatory project to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic and accentuated the digital skills of older adults and the improvement of digital literacy as part of “care.” We provide empirically based evidence of PD with older adults developing digital literacy and sensitizing concepts, based on the notion of care by Tronto for differentiating aspects and processes of care. The data suggest that it is not enough to focus solely on the technologies and how they are used; it is also necessary to focus on the social structures in which help is available and in which technologies offer opportunities to do care work. CONCLUSIONS: We document that the cocreation of different digital media tools can be used to provide a community with mutual care. Our study demonstrates how research participants effectively enact different forms of care and how such “care” is a necessary basis for a genuinely participatory approach, which became especially meaningful as a form of support during COVID-19. We reflect on how notions of “care” and “caring” that were central to the pandemic response are also central to PD.
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spelling pubmed-103909702023-08-02 Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study Paluch, Richard Cerna, Katerina Kirschsieper, Dennis Müller, Claudia J Med Internet Res Original Paper BACKGROUND: Participatory Design (PD), albeit an established approach in User-Centered Design, comes with specific challenges when working with older adults as research participants. Addressing these challenges relates to the reflection and negotiation of the positionalities of the researchers and research participants and includes various acts of giving and receiving help. During the COVID-19 pandemic, facets of positionalities and (mutual) care became particularly evident in qualitative and participatory research settings. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper was to systematically analyze care practices of participatory (design) research, which are to different extents practices of the latter. Using a multiyear PD project with older people that had to take place remotely over many months, we specify different practices of care; how they relate to collaborative work in the design project; and represent foundational practices for sustainable, long-term co-design. Our research questions were “How can digitally-mediated PD work during COVID-19 and can we understand such digital PD as ‘care’?” METHODS: Our data comes from the Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives” (JPI MYBL), a European Union project that aims to promote digital literacy and technology appropriation among older adults in domestic settings. It targeted the cocreation, by older adults and university researchers, of a mobile demo kit website with cocreated resources, aimed at improving the understanding of use options of digital tools. Through a series of workshops, a range of current IT products was explored by a group of 21 older adults, which served as the basis for joint cocreative work on generating design ideas and prototypes. We reflect on the PD process and examine how the actors enact and manifest care. RESULTS: The use of digital technology allowed the participatory project to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic and accentuated the digital skills of older adults and the improvement of digital literacy as part of “care.” We provide empirically based evidence of PD with older adults developing digital literacy and sensitizing concepts, based on the notion of care by Tronto for differentiating aspects and processes of care. The data suggest that it is not enough to focus solely on the technologies and how they are used; it is also necessary to focus on the social structures in which help is available and in which technologies offer opportunities to do care work. CONCLUSIONS: We document that the cocreation of different digital media tools can be used to provide a community with mutual care. Our study demonstrates how research participants effectively enact different forms of care and how such “care” is a necessary basis for a genuinely participatory approach, which became especially meaningful as a form of support during COVID-19. We reflect on how notions of “care” and “caring” that were central to the pandemic response are also central to PD. JMIR Publications 2023-07-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10390970/ /pubmed/37459177 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/45750 Text en ©Richard Paluch, Katerina Cerna, Dennis Kirschsieper, Claudia Müller. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 17.07.2023. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Paluch, Richard
Cerna, Katerina
Kirschsieper, Dennis
Müller, Claudia
Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title_full Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title_fullStr Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title_full_unstemmed Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title_short Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study
title_sort practices of care in participatory design with older adults during the covid-19 pandemic: digitally mediated study
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10390970/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37459177
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/45750
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