Towards care-full co-design with older adults: A feminist posthuman praxis

Abstract

Gerontechnology design is often rooted in deficit imaginaries of frail ageing bodies, with little consideration given to the sociomateriality of older adults' everyday lives, as shaped by complex social, political, historical and cultural forces. While co-design approaches have gone some way in supporting the participation of older adults, little attention has been given to how design processes can be responsive to the more-than-human lived materialities of older adults' everyday lives. More generally, there is also a need for deeper ethical engagement with the more-than-human assemblages that shape the politics and practices of co-design. In response, this article sketches out a feminist posthuman praxis of care-full co-design, grounding it in our work co-designing digital cultural experiences with older adults who live along multiple axes of inequality. Drawing on the radically deconstructive and reconstructive commitments of posthuman feminism, the discussion tentatively presents three interconnected threads of care-full co-design. These threads explore our attempts to design in the ‘thick present’, ground design in older adults' more-than-human everyday lives, and negotiate care-full (re)arrangements in the collective doing of design. The threads call for response-ability to expansive timescales and structural injustices, and to the situated knowledges and multi-sensual lifeworlds of older adults. Design is understood as an emergent process of attentive experimentation and adjustment in a bid to find a suitable arrangement of bodies, knowledges, technologies, emotions, languages, design sites and objects. We focus on particular practice-ings, tensions and challenges that emerged as we negotiated our care-full praxis.