Ageing Futures and Technologies Seminar

Ageing Futures and Technologies: industry visions and building alternative future imaginaries

We are extremely lucky to have two international scholars interested in Ageing and technology futures visiting Bristol in the same week. We will be hosting a seminar where they present their work. This will be followed by a Q and A/ panel discussion.

Speakers:

Miguel Gomez-Hernandez is a futures anthropologist in the final stages of his PhD at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University (Australia). His research explores how older adults and the AgeTech industry envision possible futures with technology. Using methods and theories from futures and visual anthropology, he reviewed industry reports, interviewed AgeTech experts, and video-ethnographically visited older adults' households drawing on GenAI and comic scenarios.His academic background includes an MSc in techno-anthropology at Aalborg University (Denmark), and a dual BA in sociology and political science at UC3M (Spain) with a year abroad at JYU (Finland). HIs publications span both the social sciences and IT-for-Health fields.

Professor Juliane Jarke is an internationally trained, interdisciplinary scholar with a background in computer science, philosophy and science and technology studies (STS). Juliane’s research attends to the transformative power of digital technologies such as AI-based systems in the public sector, education and for ageing populations. Theoretically and conceptually, her research is situated in the areas of critical data studies, new materialism and feminist STS. Methodologically, Juliane follows a design-oriented and participatory approach. This means that she collaborates on the design of socio-digital innovations with a variety of stakeholders (e.g. public authorities, citizen groups, social care service providers, NGOs), often over an extended period of time. In her research she adapts empirical social research, digital and ethnographic methods, combining them with methods of human-machine interaction (HCI) and (speculative) design research.

Presentation topics:

Accessing everyday AgeTech futures through older adults and industry's visions: a futures anthropology approach

Miguel Gomez-Hernandez. Emerging technologies lab, Monash University

Futures are not singular, distant units to be researched. This means that futures cannot be predicted, measured, or exported into other people’s lives. Rather, people make futures in their everyday life and futures are therefore incomplete, moving, and relational. In the case of Ageing Technology (AgeTech) futures, the industry attempts to predict, design, and bio-medicalise data-driven futures for older adults responding to an ostensible ageing demographic pressure. These ostensibly neutral future interventions are often divergent from older people’s visions and older adult are often reduced to passive subjects, physical needs, and overlooking their desire to repair, trust, and move with futures.

I situate my work theoretically and methodologically in futures, design, and visual anthropology to immerse with participants in the process of making AgeTech futures and understand key concepts such as trust, repair, and anxiety. My fieldwork involved a review of industry reports, interviews with AgeTech industry experts, and video-ethnographic household visits with older adults ─supported by comic and GenAI scenarios. I suggest that, in the design of plausible AgeTech, older adults’ futures should not be understood as static benchmarks but rather as an evolving process rooted in improvisation, incompleteness, and relation.

Datafied ageing futures: Regimes of anticipation and participatory futuring

Juliane Jarke, Sociology Department, University of Graz with Helen Manchester, University of Bristol

In this presentation we join others in their call to resist regimes of anticipations that suggest our futures are inevitably linked to certain imaginaries about data-driven systems. The future is not simply happening but is made now – through regimes of anticipation that shape our expectations, imaginaries, visions and hypes, and define what is thinkable and desirable. Who or what is able to claim the future is an exercise of power and a matter of social justice. However, current anticipations circulating about datafied futures are determined by powerful social actors such as states or technology companies.

We explore how we might open up futures-making to different people in relation to futures of ageing. Central is the question of whether and how we can actually think (and imagine) outside of powerful anticipation regimes around the increasing spread and relevance of data-driven systems and/or ageist assumptions about how to ‘fix’ the problem of demographic ageing. We draw on data from a series of design fiction workshops with older adults, civil society organisations and civil servants in Germany, Austria and the UK. Our analysis explores how participatory futuring might allow participants to question their own assumptions and anticipations about the futures of data-driven technologies in ageing societies but suggests that, due to ‘discursive closure’, this may not lead to radically different futures imaginaries.

Event details

THIS WILL BE A HYBRID EVENT

In person location: 13 Berkeley Square, University of Bristol, BS8 1HB

Room 1.01 (Please note that this is on the 1st floor. If you have mobility issues, we recommend joining through the Teams link.)

Online:

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Meeting ID: 374 570 977 47

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We would encourage anyone who is interested in the topic to attend. It is open to all.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Jen DeKalb-Poyer by emailing comms@ageukbristol.org.uk or phoning 0117 928 1553.

I f you have any access requirements, please let us know.

For more information about Bristol Research Forum on Ageing visit:

https://www.ageuk.org.uk/bristol/our-services/wider-work-in-the-community/research-forum/