If Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is to meet its commitment to ‘taking care of the future’, there is an urgent need to disrupt the institutionalised logics in the gerontechnology field by developing design practices that foreground the lives and voices of diverse older adults. This paper draws on emergent learning from the Connecting Through Culture As We Age project, which involves co-designing digital cultural experiences with minoritised older adults, with the aim of promoting social connection and wellbeing in later life. We explore how a feminist inspired care-full approach enables us to position design in the everyday lives of older adults, as a response to situated knowledge, and the more-than-human relational entanglements and materiality of everyday life. We do this by examining the situated practices, relationships and power dynamics across four co-design sites: older adults homes and neighbourhoods, a community hub, a community makerspace and a design studio.
Manchester et al. (Thu,) studied this question.