Aging and Interaction: Designing for Active Living Experiences

Over the last century, the life expectancy of the worldwide population has been increasing due to significant improvements in housing and healthcare. As a result, the number of older people in the worldwide population will continue to grow rapidly. Considering this, the concept of active living is an important strategy that can enhance healthy lifestyles by staying mentally, socially and physically active during aging. In this concept, digital technology can be a great tool that can help people to pursue those benefits. However, it seems that older people are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of technology directly caused by poorly designed products and user interfaces. For these reasons, this paper wants to discuss age-related changes and characteristics that usually impact the user experience, in order to delineate background information of those problems and then propose design methods and practices that can help designers to develop accessible and age-friendly products and interfaces. We use the concept of active living to verify if and how the existing products on the market are fostering the values of an active lifestyle, promoting independence, empowerment, self-esteem and self-efficacy. We conclude by exploring new conceptual and methodological design guidelines through scenario-based design for inspiring future research in this field.