Designing immersive technologies for older adults often overlooks the situated nature of community-based activities. While Virtual Reality (VR) offers promising affordances for meaningful enrichment, its integration remains underexplored in community musicking. We conducted a two-month field study at a Chinese Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), collaborating with 15 older adults and 3 music therapists through observations, interviews, and envisioning workshops. Our findings identify how older adults and therapists perceive VR through the lens of established musical values, including self-cultivation, social connectedness, and emotional and aesthetic resonance. We identified polarized responses to immersion shaped by personal history, and a recognized potential for VR to support musical imagination and reinterpretation beyond mere functionality. We discuss design considerations that emphasize therapists’ roles as gatekeepers, the need for culturally meaningful content, and responsive interactions to support the inclusive and sustainable deployment of VR in managed care settings.

Designing affective behaviors for animal-inspired social robots often relies on intuition and personal experience, leading to fragmented outcomes. To provide more systematic guidance, we first coded and analyzed human–pet interaction videos, validated insights through literature and interviews, and created structured reference cards that map the design space of pet-inspired affective interactions. Building on this, we developed MojiKit, a toolkit combining reference cards, a zoomorphic robot prototype (MomoBot), and a behavior control studio. We evaluated MojiKit in co-creation workshops with 18 participants, finding that MojiKit helped them design 35 affective interaction patterns beyond their own pet experiences, while the code-free studio lowered the technical barrier and enhanced creative agency. Our contributions include the data-informed structured resource for pet-inspired affective HRI design, an integrated toolkit that bridges reference materials with hands-on prototyping, and empirical evidence showing how MojiKit empowers users to systematically create richer, more diverse affective robot behaviors.

Older adults are increasingly invited into speculative activities within HCI, yet little is known about how researchers facilitate these processes or how this population engages in shaping alternative presents and socio-technical futures. While speculative design methods often aim to support non-designers to contribute to design processes, engaging older adults poses unique challenges that complicate their involvement. To build a comprehensive understanding, we conducted a scoping review of 44 prior studies on speculative design involving older adults, focusing on the research objectives and methodological rationales, facilitation, and how older adults engage in speculation. Through this analysis, we identify persistent methodological tensions, opportunities to advance more inclusive speculative practices with aging populations, and suggest implications for future practice.

As individuals enter their later years, they often reminisce about their past, which can significantly enhance their well-being. Current research on technology-mediated reminiscence in HCI tends to position older adults as passive subjects in reminiscence activities, with limited focus on their role as active narrators. In this study, we would to explore the potential of Generative AI, specifically through "generative dialogue" and "text-to-image" technologies, as a "listener" for older adults’ reminiscing storytelling. We conducted an experiment with seven older adults using ChatGPT to generate questions to elicit detailed narratives, and the stories were used to create corresponding images. We propose systematic influential factors and corresponding design guidelines tailored to the storytelling behaviors of older adults.

When types of communication between people are observed, one can see that communication not only consist of words but also, contextual communication consist of facial expressions and body gestures. In this study, elements that need to be considered when using light in clothes in order to express the thoughts and various emotions of the wearer and surrounding people and to design contextual interaction rather than simply for visual effects, are examined. Clothes and light are central visual elements therefore, the relationship between perception of objects through sight and emotions are examined, elements of visual language of cloths and light are examined through documentary record, elements of visual language such as shape, color, and texture of light and clothes that influence each other are classified as well as unique elements of visual elements of light such as blink speed and blink pattern, and terms that are related to the psychological effects of these elements are extracted. Based on this, using the 8 most representative human emotions which includes happiness, excitement, anger, hatred, sadness, shock, fear, and shame as standards of design, interaction design elements using clothes and light for expression of each emotion are organized in a matrix. Then, scenarios and ideas are generated, and based on the Matrix, interaction concept design in which expression of emotions and information possible using light in apparel are produced.