While much has been written on the age-based digital divide, more understanding of the relative importance of factors affecting use of the internet is needed. This paper analyses nationally representative data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to understand older adults’ frequency of using the internet and reasons for not using it more. We examine the extent to which health, lifestyle, and sociodemographic correlate with the pronounced age gradient in not using the internet. We find that the reasons why people in the 80+ cohort did not use the internet more are not qualitatively different from the reasons people aged 50–64 or 65–79 did not use it more, but do differ between rare and regular users. We also find that of the myriad factors that are potentially relevant, only cognitive ability, educational attainment, and employment status were robustly associated with the age gradient in internet use.

As people age, sleep often becomes lighter, more fragmented, and a source of increasing concern. Smart rings, like Oura, offer a discreet and comfortable means of supporting sleep tracking, yet it remains unclear how older adults engage with the sleep-related insights they provide. Our research investigates how older adults engage with wearable-derived physiological and behavioural sleep data, the barriers they encounter in understanding health metrics, and the ways these technologies influence self-perception and wellbeing practices. We report findings from a one-month diary study (n=20) and follow-up interviews (n=10) after around four months of ring use. Participants reflected on the meanings they attributed to app-based metrics, and whether such feedback felt useful, confusing, or intrusive, revealing misalignments with youthful defaults that negatively impacted engagement. We explore this in terms of "age friction" and discuss opportunities for more age-inclusive wearable technologies that promote meaningful engagement with personal health and wellbeing data.

Abstract The focus on managing problems that can arise for older adults has meant that extant HCI and Ageing research has not given the concepts of “age”’ and “ageing” the explicit theoretical attention they deserve. Attending to this gap, we critically examine a ten-year corpus of CHI publications through the lens of an existing typology that we have further developed to analyse how age is understood, interpreted, and constructed in the field of HCI. Our resulting multidimensional typology of age in HCI elucidates the distinctive characteristics of older adults considered when designing with and for this user group, but also highlights the need for a more critical, reflexive, social constructivist approach to age in HCI. Applying this approach, we explore age as a multidimensional system of stratification to better understand the phenomenon of the age-based digital divide.

In the context of extensive bank branch closures, and a rapidly ageing population, older adults’ (OAs’) reluctance to adopt digital banking platforms by themselves is concerning. However, many OAs rely on the support of close others (COs) to complete banking activities with them. This support is mostly provided through “unofficial” mechanisms such as sharing online banking credentials, which risk an OA's privacy and security. This paper replicates a Canadian study with OAs in a UK context and extends it with co-design workshops focused on novel banking solutions for OAs and COs, helping to formalise the role of unofficial proxies within online platforms. Results show that unofficial proxy banking also occurs with COs in a UK context and co-design reveals barriers to OAs’ use of banking technology independently. We discuss recommendations for flexible, easily authenticated and easy to learn digital banking solutions for OAs in the future.

The efficacy of digital solutions to increase energy efficiency, including technical optimisations and behavioural influence, has long been a subject of debate within sustainable HCI (SHCI). While the viewpoints of policymakers and academics are frequently published (and often contradictory), less is known about the views of those on the ground. In this paper we ask: What are energy professionals’ views of digital energy-saving interventions and their users? What are the challenges they face implementing these interventions? Based on a university campus case study with twelve semi-structured interviews and a focus group with energy and facilities’ professionals, we illustrate how they strongly advocate digital efficiency as a pathway to sustainability; yet, this optimism is in apparent tension with key barriers they identify to realising ‘their seamless visions’, particularly the complexities of the human behaviour they are seeking to optimise. These findings underscore the seductiveness of techno-optimism and the need for more systemic change.

The uptake of digital technology by older adults and service-providers has been partly driven by the pandemic but more recently by the erosion of in-person services because of increasing austerity and a harsher global economic climate. Against the backdrop of the UK’s cost of living crisis, we examine technology used frequently within five older adults’ households. Through two rounds of interviews and participant diaries, we show benefits and struggles of participants’ costly technology use, reflecting on what ‘cost of living’ means when technology designed to simplify older peoples lives, encounters problems. For HCI practitioners, we provide evidence of how personal smart devices can be better tailored to help older adults support themselves both economically and practically, during the cost of living crisis. We propose avenues for future research and design that better support indirect costs and reflect on how personal devices can be made self-sustaining, integrated and repairable.

Extant literature has proposed an important role for trust in moderating people’s willingness to disclose personal information, but there is scant HCI literature that deeply explores the relationship between privacy and trust in apparent privacy paradox circumstances. Attending to this gap, this article reports a qualitative study examining how people account for continuing to use services that conflict with their stated privacy preferences, and how trust features in these accounts. Our findings undermine the notion that individuals engage in strategic thinking about privacy, raising important questions regarding the explanatory power of the well-known privacy calculus model and its proposed relationship between privacy and trust. Finding evidence of hopeful trust in participants’ accounts, we argue that trust allows people to morally account for their “paradoxical” information disclosure behavior. We propose that effecting greater alignment between people’s privacy attitudes and privacy behavior—or “un-paradoxing privacy”—will require greater regulatory assurances of privacy.

By CHI 2022, fifteen years will have passed since the emergence of Sustainable HCI (SHCI), which now constitutes an important subfield of HCI. In this paper, we draw on two SHCI corpora to ask: Has SHCI progressed? How has the field responded to prominent critiques? Have we identified and adopted constructive strategies for impacting environmental unsustainability? We further show the wide array of competencies SHCI researchers have been called to develop, and how this has been reflected in subsequent work. Our analysis identifies significant shifts in the SHCI landscape, toward research that is diverse and holistic, but also away from efforts to address the urgent climate crisis. We posit that SHCI has tended to take on far more than it could reasonably expect to deliver, and propose ‘Green Policy informatics’ as a pathway that enables SHCI to leverage a more traditional HCI skillset in addressing climate change.

People’s data practices and their supporting personal informatics are imbued with a wide range of concepts of value that are central to their data imaginaries. They inform how individuals adopt particular products and services. This elusiveness of value creates a challenge for designers to gauge users’ value preferences, which are personal, contextual and abstract. We propose deliberation as a process to operationalise design for elicitation, reflection and value formation, using Live Action Role Play (LARP). The paper demonstrates how our deliberative LARP precipitates the otherwise ethereal data values to unfold in a social setting. We argue that engaging people in reflecting on and playing out their own value formation offers designers more powerful insights to address complex challenges of data-driven societies. We report on our findings that agency and negotiability are key to transcend the politics of preferences in data practices and thus enhance acceptability.

This paper reports on the first year of a three-year-long co-creation project with older adults. We focus our analysis on one particular workshop in which participants stopped designing and began to think about promoting the app we were co-creating. The workshop proved uniquely important for examining assumptions we had made about how and why the co-creation process would be successful. This paper concedes flaws in these assumptions and in the execution of the methodology as a way of illuminating dynamics that act on research projects in ways that are antithetical to effective co-creation. Reporting on the unexpected results of our participant engagements, we reveal new insights into the challenges in executing co-creation methodology.

In this paper we report on research exploring the privacy, security and safety implications of children being able to program Internet of Things devices. We present our methodology for understanding the contexts in which children may wish to use programmable IoT, identifying risks that emerge in such contexts, and creating a set of questions that might guide design of such technologies so that they are safe for child users. We evaluate the success of the methodology, discuss the limitations of the approach, and describe future work.

More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCI's role in addressing it. We think this is largely a positive sign, reflective of maturity; yet, lacking a clear set of aims and metrics for sustainability continues to be the community's impediment to progressing, hence we seek to articulate a vision around which the community can productively coalesce. Drawing from recent SHCI publications, we identify commonalities that might form the basis of a shared understanding, and we show that this understanding closely aligns with the authoritative conception of a path to a sustainable future proffered by Naomi Klein in her book emphThis Changes Everything. We elaborate a set of contributions that SHCI is already making that can be unified under Klein's narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI.

Older adults frequently deploy the concept of distrust when discussing digital technologies, and it is tempting to assume that distrust is largely responsible for the reduced uptake by older adults witnessed in the latest surveys of technology use. To help understand the impact of distrust on adoption behavior, we conducted focus groups with older adults exploring how, in what circumstances, and to what effect older adults articulate distrust in digital technologies. Our findings indicate that distrust is not especially relevant to older adults’ practical decision making around technology (non-)use. The older adults in our study used the language of distrust to open up discussions around digital technologies to larger issues related to values. This suggests that looking to distrust as a predictor of non-use (e.g., in Technology Acceptance Model studies) may be uniquely unhelpful in the case of older adults, as it narrows the discussion of technology acceptance and trust to interactional issues, when their use of distrust pertains to much wider concerns. Likewise, technology adoption should not be viewed as indicative of trust or an endorsement of technology acceptability. Older adults using-while-distrusting offers important insights into how to design truly acceptable digital technologies.

Designing persuasive technology—that is, technology to change people's behaviors and attitudes—is seen as a morally risky venture. Recent work has begun to apply established approaches such as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and Participatory Design, which guide the designer to deeply and deliberately engage with the needs and values of future users and other stakeholders. But with super-wicked problems such as global climate change, these approaches can mire the designer in analysis paralysis—particularly problematic as harmful effects of climate change are already upon us. Is sustainability, thus, an exception to the emerging consensus that ethical design proceeds slowly and cautiously? We argue not: whether caused by climate change, war, disease or injustice, human suffering always demands the swiftest response that is prudently possible. We argue for a mature balance between deliberation and action—especially when the consequences of action are unforeseeable but the consequences of inaction are unthinkable. We propose a route forward whereby practitioners may ethically realize the full persuasive potential of persuasive technologies: by adopting a VSD approach to cultivating values and fostering deliberation; by engaging in Participatory Design not with end-users, as is traditionally done, but with domain experts who can offer real insight into meaningful persuasive technology goals; by supporting collective action rather than preserving above all users' rights to opt out of persuasion; and by appealing to fear in cases where fear is integral to the narrative driving the persuasive technology goal, while promoting efficacy in the face of fear.

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.

As in all collaborative work, trust is a vital ingredient of successful computer supported cooperative work, yet there is little in the way of design principles to help practitioners develop systems that foster trust. To address this gap, we present a set of design patterns, based on our experience designing systems with the explicit intention of increasing trust between stakeholders. We contextualize these patterns by describing our own learning process, from the development, testing and refinement of a trust model, to our realization that the insights we gained along the way were most usefully expressed through design patterns. In addition to a set of patterns for trust, this paper seeks to demonstrate of the value of patterns as a means of communicating the nuances revealed through ethnographic investigation.

Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice.

This paper challenges the sustainable HCI community to move away from a focus on demand and instead address climate change as a supply problem. We identify a new route to impact, namely addressing the psychological barriers that interfere with political mobilization toward limiting the use of fossil fuels. Five barriers are explored as a means of re-focusing research objectives for the community.

Driven by changes in working practices and technology trends, organizations are increasingly reliant on mobile workers and the data they capture. However, while significant work has been carried out on increasing the usability of mobile devices and applications, little attention has been paid to the quality of data captured by mobile workers. If this data is inaccurate or untrustworthy, serious consequences can ensue. In this paper we study a system targeted at mobile workers in the highways sector that is deliberately designed to increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data collected. The resulting Inspections application has been very positively received by workers and we present lessons that we believe can be applied to other applications of this type.

This paper develops a holistic framework of questions which seem to motivate sustainability research in computing in order to enable new opportunities for critique. Analysis of systematically selected corpora of computing publications demonstrates that several of these question areas are well covered, while others are ripe for further exploration. It also provides insight into which of these questions tend to be addressed by different communities within sustainable computing. The framework itself reveals discursive similarities between other existing environmental discourses, enabling reflection and participation with the broader sustainability debate. It is argued that the current computing discourse on sustainability is reformist and premised in a Triple Bottom Line construction of sustainability. A radical, Quadruple Bottom Line alternative is explored as a new vista for computing research.