This paper offers an exploration of the attitudes of older adults to keeping in touch with people who are important to them. We present findings from three focus groups with people from 55 to 81 years of age. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that older adults view the act of keeping in touch as being worthy of time and dedication, but also as being something that needs to be carefully managed within the context of daily life. Communication is seen as a means through which skill should be demonstrated and personality expressed, and is understood in a very different context to the lightweight interaction that is increasingly afforded by new technologies. The themes that emerged are used to elicit a number of design implications and to promote some illustrative design concepts for new communication devices.

PDF file

In: Proceedings of the 2009 SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM’s Digital Library --http://www.acm.org/dl/.

Details