Geezers, turbines, fantasy personas

Abstract

This paper describes how a project to challenge digital exclusion resulted in GeezerPower: an artwork that is both a statement about reusable technologies and about older people's continuing interest in the world of the future. We use the story of its production to illustrate and reflect on new methods for engaging people in decisions about the design of technology. And we explore how creative practice informed the design of an intervention workshop inspired by performance art and an exhibition of artists collaborating with older people. We conclude with some comments on marginalization, engagement and envisioning futures.

Future public policy and its knowledge base: shaping worldviews through counterfactual world-making

“…We see this as building on Light's work on Democratizing Technology: a project that used performance techniques to engage those excluded from discussion of design choices to consider what the social implications of networking everything might be, before implementation embedded these tools and their impacts (Light 2011;Light et al 2009). Light (2011Light ( , 2019 addresses the designed-therefore-designable nature of the world, hoping to enable participants to take a more active role as citizens facing changes.…”

Situated Encounters with Socially Engaged Art in Community-based Design

“…Democratising Technology (www.demtech.qmul.ac.uk) was a research project that brought older people's community groups together with researchers to produce a generative, open-ended form of engagement with digital technology. We deliberately used arts methods to devise techniques that could be brought to bear on the design of our society and tools [32,34,35]. Informed by performance artist Lois Weaver's practice [49], she and I worked with participants' values and aspirations for the future, using performance development methods as a transformational tool to produce a workshop of techniques for engaging people to consider social values for future technologies.…”

“…I wrote the bid when I worked as a design consultant and winning the grant helped propel me into an academic role. Lois and I used co-design methodology and arts theory on engagement [5,33,34,49] to create a new path to democratically influencing the shape of future technology. We wanted to start with structures that seed ideas rather than introduce scenarios that would dictate themes.…”

“…We argue that wider awareness of socially engaged arts (SEA) practitioner roles can be of benefit and part of our contribution is to help acknowledge this and open up further discussion. SEA has emerged within HCI over the past decade [13] facilitated by its orientation towards social change, social justice [12,34], sustainability [8,15], inclusion and participation [48]. And yet, while practices have been adopted in design research they still remain largely under-acknowledged.…”

“…We believe that we are in a privileged position to contribute by articulating the complexities and intricacies of community engagement from our own experiences. Our authorship consists of HCI researchers with backgrounds in SEA practice [6,12]; and well-established HCI academics who have worked extensively with SEA practitioners [33,34,35,37] and drawn conceptual and theoretical insights from such work [38,51]. However, we also advocate for additional work to build and sustain more equitable and inclusive relationships between researchers and communities.…”