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.

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.

Abstract Intersectionality within HCI is often only considered when it is made the topic of the study itself. Whether or not this should be the case is debated, as scope is often something researchers try to outline. This paper argues that reflexivity offers a particularly important solution when it comes to Intersectional HCI combined with the observing, analysing and understanding the impact on interactions between users and the technology, as well as the interactions between the teams building the software. This paper calls for all researchers to consider how race, gender and other protected characteristics may affect their research even when these are not the topics being researched, and to share this data in publication. To facilitate this, this paper presents a series of prompts in the form of usable cards, to aid researchers in carrying out reflective practices.