As digital inclusion becomes a growing indicator of wellbeing in later life, the ability to understand older adults’ preferences for information and communication technologies (ICTs) and develop strategies to support their digital literacy is critical. The barriers older adults face include their perceived ICT risks and capacity to learn. Complexities, including ICT environmental stressors and societal norms, may require concerted engagement with older adults to achieve higher digital literacy competencies. This article describes the results of a series of co-design workshops to develop strategies for increased ICT competencies and reduced perceived risks among older adults. Engaging older Australians in three in-person workshops (each workshop consisting of 15 people), this study adapted the “Scenario Personarrative Method” to illustrate the experiences of people with technology and rich pictures of the strategies seniors employ. Through the enrichment of low-to-high-digital-literacy personas and mapping workshop participant responses to several scenarios, the workshops contextualized the different opportunities and barriers seniors may face, offering a useful approach toward collaborative strategy development. We argued that in using co-designed persona methods, scholars can develop more nuance in generating ICT risk strategies that are built with and for older adults. By allowing risks to be contextualized through this approach, we illustrated the novelty of adapting the Scenario Personarrative Method to provide insights into perceived barriers and to build skills, motivations, and strategies toward enhancing digital literacy.

In seeking to support healthy aging, designers have struggled to reduce their assumptions and biases toward older adults, been seen to interpret the worlds of later life through unfiltered imagery, as well as engage with stigmas, ultimately diminishing the technologies they construct. This article seeks to critically analyse this state-of-the-art from a design research perspective while engaging with the growing interdisciplinary study of aging and technologies. Toward this, we proposition “resolution” as a concept indicative of the level of detail that seeks to characterize the fidelity that representations of later life have. This concept is explored through a cultural probe study that investigated the sentiments of several older Australians regarding the inequities and social isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing a diary alongside photovoice and mapping tasks, the study captured perceptions of social technology, practices, networks, and wellbeing, offering a diverse and complex picture of aging and technology. Through reflexive thematic analyses of some of these materials, this case study offers designers pathways to understanding and including older adults in their work. In determining the resolution of these images of aging, we discuss how transparency about the limitations and qualities of such participatory methods through incorporating reflexivity can influence the degree of detail such imagery gains. Ultimately this concept builds on the notion of participation configuration, supporting designers to realize better images of aging and representations of later life.

Over the past two decades, location-based games have moved from media art fringes to the mass cultural mainstream. Through their locative affordances, these game types enable practices of wayfaring and placemaking, with the capacity to deliver powerful tacit knowledge. These affordances suggest the potential for the development of location-based games in educational contexts. This paper presents three cases studies—TIMeR and Wayfinder Live and Pet Playing four Placemaking—to illustrate how each uses elements of wayfaring and placemaking to bring new opportunities for education through a tacit knowledge approach.

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It is proposed that a progressive Industrial Design education should focus on supporting students in learning to self-manage ambiguity and bolster their agile independence throughout the tentative undergraduate years of growth [1]. As the field of Industrial Design moves beyond its industrial manufacturing roots, exploration of curricula that anticipates contemporary issues such as decolonisation, diverse participation and complexity in creative innovation is still not prevalent in this contemporary period [2]. Such a context necessitates an accelerated disruption to traditional design pedagogical practices [3], as seen in the RMIT University Industrial Design programme My First Six Months (MF6M) -a first-year learner-centred initiative situated around capacity development, student agency, self-efficacy, and disruption of expectations about the power dynamics in learning and teaching. This paper outlines the adoption of the RMIT University, My First 6 Months (MF6M) first-year learnercentred pedagogical alignment into the 2 nd and 3 rd year vertically integrated studio environment, through the case study 'Safeness by Design (SbD)-Enabling an Ageing Workforce'a collaborative partnership with the Innovation Centre of WorkSafe Victoria, a state government safety regulatory body. In curating the studio's outcomes, it became evident that the embedded predispositions developed throughout their MF6M experience, activated the diversity of students' thinking and acting in situations resembling real-world design practice, which achieved our SbD studio's pedagogical ambitions. We found this model to be highly transferable, requiring less teaching staff intervention and giving more flexibility to students, by reinforcing notions of independence, trust and self-efficacy in learning. Students are scaffolded as they dynamically explore and frame their own inquiry questions and continue developing their professional identity throughout their studies. In doing so, the classroom is firmly situated as a safe and democratic creative space, whereby teaching staff adopt a coaching role to establish a collaborative partnership, to further support student capacity and confidence.