Not Just a Number: A Multidimensional Approach to Ageing in HCI

2025-01-22

AI Summary

Existing HCI research predominantly treats age as a biological variable, overlooking its socially constructed, intersectional, situated, and dynamic nature—resulting in superficial understandings of the digital divide among older adults. This study critically analyzes CHI publications from 2013–2023 using bibliometrics, critical discourse analysis, and social constructionist theory. It proposes the first multidimensional age taxonomy for HCI, reconceptualizing age as a layered, malleable, and sociopolitically embedded dimension shaped by power relations. The taxonomy shifts HCI’s orientation from problem-centered approaches toward a reflexive age epistemology, exposing reductive and occlusive age representations in mainstream research. By grounding inclusive digital design in a theoretically robust framework, it addresses a critical gap in age theorization within HCI.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Human-Computer Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

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 which 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.

Problem

• Aging
• Technology Adoption
• Social Impact

Innovation

• Age-as-factor
• Social-impact
• Comprehensive-framework