Understanding Older Adult Values through Technologies Used for Crafting

The experience of ageing is of great interest to interaction design, chiefly to better meet the needs of older adults with assistive technology. Crafting is often part of this experience, yet little explored in previous research, even though it is inherently creative and social. In interaction design, making approaches are known to move the agency of creation away from designers and towards end-users. The aim of this research was to understand and characterize the aspects of crafting that are intrinsically valued by older adult crafters, with a view to understanding how new forms of technologies and socio-technical practices might be designed while honoring these values. We worked with two crafting communities over a period of two months and conducted interviews, participant observations and cultural probes, aimed at exploring the role of technology within crafting. Our results highlighted values that lead to technology being included in crafting practices: belonging, quality, and creativity. We discuss how these values open up a design space for creating technologies with older adult crafters.