Abstract Students benefit from international study programmes in fields such as HCI. However, user-centred research in a foreign country has some challenges, especially language hurdles when going into the field and conducting ethnographic and participatory studies. A particular obstacle is added when targeting groups that do not speak English, such as in Germany, where English was not taught in schools until the 1970s. The task and challenge of the present project, ‘Research Buddy’, is to bring together young international students and older people as co-researchers in Germany. We describe the participatory development of the concept of a matching platform and its design. In focus groups with older people, university faculty and students, requirements for a collaborative research infrastructure were jointly identified and prototypically implemented. The empirical results focus on the possibilities the platform offers for qualitative citizen science in the field of age tech.

Abstract Robots used for care purposes have been the subject of considerable research effort, often interdisciplinary. However, our work has shown that there are frequently difficulties in working together to produce interdisciplinary knowledge on human–robot and human–computer interaction. We describe an initiative to enable participants within and across research projects to improve collaboration. Mandated by the funding body, we developed the Research Practice Workshop tool to bring together 10 projects and more than 100 people from science, technology and healthcare in a large-scale funding stream. Our tool creates space for interdisciplinary participation, despite its top-down project structure. We present data from seven Research Practice Workshops that illustrate how knowledge sharing worked and what challenges we faced in accordance with our iterative and participatory approach. The aim is to show how networks of practice transfer knowledge, facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation and create imaginaries of robotics for care. The Research Practice Workshops are a valuable tool for creating shared visions and practical implementations with all stakeholders in a democratic process. This demonstrates how design knowledge can become relevant in interdisciplinary collaboration and how Research Practice Workshops can support large scale research networks. Ultimately, our paper contributes both to best practices in heterodox scientific project management and to an understanding of how disciplinary perspectives mediate research.

Robotic systems are increasingly seen as possible technical aids against the background of demographic change and the associated pressures on care systems, with increasing numbers of care recipients and a decreasing number of trained caregivers. In human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work, different design paradigms are currently being pursued to explore which features and appearances are favorable for meaningful interactions of humans with robotic systems. One such approach, labeled as "otherware", proposes to conceptualize robots beyond a naive anthropomorphism or zoomorphism, rather developing the idea of a figure that goes beyond the dichotomy between "being alive" and "being a technical artefact". We present an ethnographic study on the perceptions, attitudes, and practices of care attendants and nursing-home residents in their experimenting with off-the-shelf robotic cats and dogs. The three-week study shows specific appropriation practices of the robotic pets, and how the care attendants - partly together with the residents - define their experiences of the robotic pets, i.e., in which situations the robotic pets are considered either as living beings or as technology toys. The study provides practice-based insights into how possible uses of robotic pets could be meaningfully integrated into care practices, but also which ethical reflections were discussed during their use. Finally, this ethnographic study functioned as a collaborative learning process between researchers, care attendants, and residents, and thus also points out possible aspects that arose with regard to future learning spaces of professional and organizational development for dealing with innovative technologies in residential care contexts.