The focus on managing problems that can arise for older adults has meant that extant HCI and Ageing research has not given the concepts of 'age' and 'ageing' the explicit theoretical attention they deserve. Attending to this gap, we critically examine a ten-year corpus of CHI publications through the lens of an existing typology which we have further developed to analyse how age is understood, interpreted and constructed in the field of HCI. Our resulting multidimensional typology of age in HCI elucidates the distinctive characteristics of older adults considered when designing with and for this user group, but also highlights the need for a more critical, reflexive, social constructivist approach to age in HCI. Applying this approach, we explore age as a multidimensional system of stratification to better understand the phenomenon of the age-based digital divide.
@article{arxiv.2501.12924,
title = {Not Just a Number: A Multidimensional Approach to Ageing in HCI},
author = {Bran Knowles and Jasmine Fledderjohann and Aneesha Singh and Richard Harper and Julia McDowell and Judith Tsouvalis and Alice Ashcroft and Yvonne Rogers and Ewan Soubutts and Andrew Steptoe and Caroline Swarbrick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12924},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
34 pages, plus 5 pages of appendix, and 13 pages of supplemental bibliography; 4 tables, 2 figures