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Accepted Paper:

Negotiating goodness in AAL research and development  
Susanne Oechsner (University of Klagenfurt)

Paper long abstract:

The aging population is seen as one of the greatest challenges European societies will face in the upcoming decades and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is framed as one promising solution. I assume AAL systems/products/services, their users and society to be co-produced (Jasanoff, 2004) in RTD practices, which are simultaneously shaped by and productive of broader visions of the collective good. A required part of RTD practice in projects funded under the European Commission's AAL Joint Programme or the Austrian benefit programme is user involvement, which I understand as an array of practices of enacting and negotiating sociomaterial values. Multiple stakeholders are hereby included in the RTD process, who might come with their specific vision of what a well-aging society is and what needs to be done to get there. In this paper I will inquire which practices of user involvement are deemed valuable by differently situated actors in order to work towards a well-aging society, appropriate user representations and, accordingly, a successful system/product/service. Drawing on preliminary empirical results from my PhD-project (document analysis and qualitative interviews with project workers) I will focus on practices of good RTD in the AAL context and explore what work is needed for a multiplicity of values to be given space in RTD practice and how tensions between differing versions of goodness and clashing visions of attainable futures are balanced.

Panel E4
Health innovation and the grand challenge of ageing: Governing the personal health systems revolution
  Session 1 Wednesday 17 September, 2014, -