MRL Distinguished Speaker Series 2 June

Professor Geraldine Fitzpatrick

Older People Are People Too: Framing Technology For Living

Geraldine is Professor of technology Design and Assessment, leading the Human Computer Interaction group in the Institute for Technology Assessment and Design in Vienna. In this lecture Geraldine will talk about how whether we conceptualise issues, implicitly or explicitly, radically influences how we design and deploy technologies. Her argument here is that this is particularly so with older people and technology, where notions of aging as physiological decline and increased health issues lead to solutions that are often primarily driven by accessibility and/or care monitoring. Newer developmental theories of aging suggest quite different roles for technology for older people and examples of these will be illustrated through a number of different case studies. Technology for older people is much better framed as being about living in place than aging in place.Prior to joining TUW, she was Director of the Interact Lab at the University of Sussex. She has also worked as a user experience consultant at Sapient, London, and as a senior research fellow at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre and the Centre for Online Health in Australia. Her research interests lie in the support of social interaction and collaboration, particularly in how pervasive, tangible and Web 2.0 technologies can be designed and deployed to fit in with everyday contexts of work, play and daily life.