Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the co-design of tangible user interfaces to enable storytelling with older adults. We explore the absences and presences that the older adults worked with, across space/time and human/non human elements, in making sense of their lives lived in embodied and material ways.

Paper long abstract:

Objects have their own biographies and take on multiple and fluid roles in our lives, connecting emotional worlds, people and ideas across a life. Objects can serve as icons that help to bind moments of experience together, allowing people to create new narratives about their identities and begin to 'curate' a story of their lives . Places and landscapes also have their own stories, different for each person who has experienced it.

In working with older adults across three care settings in the UK we discovered that older adults were not only physically removed from the landscapes and places where they had spent their lives but also often had lost many of the personal objects that had been important. Working closely with older adults we co-designed a set of geographical tangible user interfaces as a form of 'proxy object' to stand in for objects and places that had been lost in the transition to the care home environment.

This paper explores the process of involving older adults, and the rich context of their lives lived in embodied and material ways, as co-designers of these technological proxy objects. In particular we explore the various absences and presences that the older adults were continually working with, across space/time and human/non human elements, in order to support our co-design work and to begin to curate a story of their lives to others.