Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we take a step back and explore reconnection -- find out about or re-contact old friends, an emerging topic due to the increased use of computer-mediated technology by older adults to maintain friendships and form new ones. We report on our findings from semi-structured interviews with 28 individuals from Costa Rica and Poland. The interviews aimed to explore whether there is a wish to reconnect, and the challenges encountered by older adults to reconnect. We contribute with design considerations for tools allow- ing older adults to reconnect, discussing opportunities for technology.
@article{arxiv.1806.03249,
title = {Design Challenges for Reconnecting in Later Life: A Qualitative Study},
author = {Francisco Ibarra and Grzegorz Kowalik and Marcos Baez and Radosław Nielek and Norma Lau and Luca Cernuzzi and Fabio Casati},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.03249},
year = {2018}
}