Co-Creating ICT Risk Strategies with Older Australians: A Workshop Model

Abstract

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.

Digitalisierung und Teilhabe in der Bildung

“…5 Anhand der Literaturverzeichnisse der im Prozess der Kodierung ausgewählten Studien wurden außerdem mittels Citation Pearl Growing ohne Eingrenzung des Publikationszeitraums weitere Studien identifi ziert. Das Korpus wurde schließlich durch zusätzliche Titel aus der Eigenrecherche der Autorin und des Autors ergänzt, u. a. auch durch einzelne Studien, die im Laufe des Bearbeitungszeitraums veröff entlicht wurden (Buddeberg & Grell, 2023;Hausmann & Martins, 2023;Lacher & Rohs, 2023;Sheahan et al, 2023).…”

Socialisation Agents’ Use(fulness) for Older Consumers Learning ICT

“…Furthermore, Selwyn [50] argues that although adult children (and grandchildren) may appear to be a significant official socialisation agent for older adults' ICT usage, they are rarely the sole reason for their parents' interest in ICT. Older adults often compare their ICT skills with peer groups, another important source for ICT interest [51] and the consequent socialisation process towards preparing for the digital consumer role.…”

Commentary: Strength-based co-design that EMPOWERs – Lessons from codesigning with older adults

“…The tool is based on personas – fictional characters representing different types of consumers, problems they may have and goals they hope to achieve (Cooper, 1999). When creating the personas, we included participants in both simple tasks, such as naming the personas, and a more complex persona enrichment task (Sheahan et al , 2022). Persona enrichment was a new method we used, allowing participants to add characteristics to basic personas derived from our initial interviews with other participants.…”