A project funded by STW under the Research Through Design program
In products designed especially for older people, the inventiveness and resourcefulness of elderly is often underestimated in favor of ‘foolproof’ designs mistakenly assuming older people to helpless and frail.
In this project instead, we focus on what older people can still do, and on the strategies they put in place to creatively cope with their ageing skills. Our goal is to find out how to design connected products for elderly people that can improvise in use, and thus remain appropriate to a large variety of situations.
A collaboration between industrial design, computer science, social sciences and industry partners, this project uses a combination of machine learning and ethnographic fieldwork to research and prototype designs that can support the everyday practices of resourcefulness of elderly people.
Resourceful Ageing is a two year project that kicked off in June 2016. It involves four senior researchers, three postdocs and a range of technical assistants and master students.
In our ‘research-through-design’ process, we do Thing Ethnography by combining ethnographic studies with Machine Learning, and enlisting as participants a community of both elderly people and the objects they ordinarily use and ‘misuse.’
Scientific publications, conferences, lectures and public workshops.
Giaccardi, E., Kuijer, L., Neven, L. (2016) Design for Resourceful Ageing: Intervening in the Ethics of Gerontechnology. In Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
www.drs2016.orgKuijer, L., Nicenboim, I.P., Giaccardi, E. (2017) Conceptualising Resourcefulness as a Dispersed Practice. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’17). New York: ACM Press, 15-27.
www.dl.acm.orgGiaccardi, E. (2017) Does the Artefact Speak by Itself? Histories and Futures of Research Through Design. Opening keynote at the 2017 Research Through Design Biennial Conference. Edinburgh, UK, 22-24 March, 2017.
www.researchgate.netThe research group is composed by a multidiciplinary team of researcher and industry partners with expertise in the key areas of the project: interaction design, social sciences, and computer science.
PI, TU Delft
Co-PI, TU Delft
Researcher, TU Delft
Researcher, TU Delft
Co-PI, TU Eindhoven
Co-PI, Avans Hogeschool
Researcher, Avans Hogeschool
Philips Design
Philips Design
Philips Design
MS in Industrial Design, TU Delft
MS in Industrial Design, TU Delft
MS in Industrial Design, TU Delft
MS in Industrial Design, TU Delft
MS in Industrial Design, TU Delft
MS in Computer Science, TU Delft
MS in Computer Science, TU Delft
MS in Computer Science, TU Delft
MS in Industrial Design, TU Eindhoven