Call for Papers - Special issue: making old age inviting and worth 
living through ICTS in the 21st century

Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal

http://life.mifav.uniroma2.it/inevent/events/idea2010/index.php?s=102&link=call36

Overview

The aim of this special issue is to bring together a number of 
high-quality papers that contribute to make old age, which is defined 
herein as a sociocultural category conferred on individuals at a 
particular point in their lives, not only inviting but also worth living 
through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the 
beginning of the 21st century.

A growing ageing population is changing the world, with important 
implications for almost all sectors of society, wherein communication, 
production and exchange of information are of the utmost importance. 
Information and Communication Technologies are widely regarded as those 
technologies that make this communication, production and exchange of 
information possible. However, there are reasons to argue that 
revolutionary changes in digital technologies, demography and longevity 
have not evolved well together.

Much of today’s research is based on the assumption that people aged 60+ 
are old. But what if our older users do not regard themselves as old? 
The dimensions of ageing that tend to play a central role in studying 
the relationship between older people and ICTs, and in designing these 
technologies for this group, are narrowed down to age-related changes in 
functional abilities and shrinking social networks; yet, ageing is far 
richer and complex. The main taken-for-granted role of ICTs in the 
everyday lives of older people is to ‘help them do something’. However, 
in light of the presence of digital technologies in multiple facets of 
the lives of most of us, there is room for thinking that the role that 
ICTs play in older people’s lives can and should go beyond helping them 
to improve their health, age in place and keep in touch with their 
children and grandchildren. How can we design ICTs that truly enrich 
older people’s lives? In addition to this, current research has mainly 
been conducted with people who were born in the first half of the 20th 
century. How will this body of knowledge change when we work with older 
people who have grown up with digital technologies?

As scholars, we should recognize that we still know little about (i) 
what computers, smartphones, video-sharing sites, smart cities, social 
robots, and so on mean for an eighty-year old person; (ii) how we should 
design these and other technologies for the current and next generation 
of older people, and, perhaps more importantly, (iii) how to make old 
age inviting and worth living through ICTs at the beginning of the 21st 
century.

This special issue aims to address these and other critical related 
issues / open questions by bringing together research on ageing and 
digital technologies conducted in several areas, such as Human-Computer 
Interaction, Digital Games, Media Studies, Gerontology, Psychology and 
Sociology of Ageing.

Guest Editors

• Sergio Sayago, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
• Josep Blat, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Margarida Romero, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France
• Kim Sawchuk, Concordia University, Canada

Important dates

• Deadline: January 31, 2018
• Notification to the authors: February 28, 2018
• Camera ready paper: March 15, 2018
• Publication of the special issue: end of March, 2018

-- 
Sergio Sayago
Universitat de Barcelona
http://sergiosayagoblog.wordpress.com

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