ONGOING RESEARCH
Older Adults in Smart Living Environments
Understanding when digital services and technologies don't fit people's everyday lives
This research explores what happens when digital services and technologies do not fit an older person's needs, resources or circumstances, and how the actors whose decisions and practices shape these services and technologies could respond.
Research lead:
Rihab Oubaidah
Research Lead:
Key insights
A digital service can work as designed and still not work for the person using it.
Misfit can arise when decisions and practices across connected actors shape what a service asks someone to do in ways that conflict with that person's needs, resources or circumstances.
By tracing these difficulties back through the wider system, the research aims to identify the practices involved, who has the authority and ability to revise them, and where change could make services work better for people.
Impact in practice
The research could help technology providers, service organisations, governments and policymakers better recognise when their services do not fit people's needs, resources or circumstances and understand where changes can be made.
It examines how these actors could use older adults' experiences to identify and revise the connected practices that contribute to misfit.
About the research
Digital services and technologies increasingly shape everyday activities, from managing our homes and finances to accessing healthcare and public services. In this research, smart living environments include technology-enabled physical settings, digitally mediated public and commercial services, infrastructures, and formal and informal support.
Technical performance alone gives an incomplete picture of how a service works in someone's everyday life. For example, a digitally controlled heating system may be functioning exactly as designed, but still make it difficult for someone to control the temperature in their own home. This could happen if adjusting the heating requires an app that is incompatible with the person's phone. Rihab's research describes this as person-environment misfit, when what a service asks a person to do, its service demand, conflicts with that person's needs, resources or circumstances and constrains the activity they intend to pursue.
The research starts with these everyday experiences and then traces how the service demands involved were produced. It examines the decisions and practices of the organisations, technology providers, governments and other actors involved in designing, delivering or governing the relevant service or technology. These connected actors and practices form the marketing system examined in this research.
The aim is to understand how misfit is produced, how actors recognise and respond to it, and which connected practices they might revise.
Why it matters
When digital services do not fit people's circumstances, everyday activities can become harder, require repeated attempts, depend on help from someone else or remain unfinished. Support may help someone carry out an activity, or involve another person completing it on their behalf. These difficulties can also be largely invisible to organisations if success is measured only by whether someone eventually completed the task.
The service demands involved may reflect connected practices across several parts of a system, including technology companies, service providers, municipalities and policymakers. Understanding these connections can help these actors link recurring difficulties to the practices involved and identify who has the authority and ability to revise them.
Research focus
The central question guiding the project is "How are person-environment misfits produced, recognised and addressed within marketing systems?"
Older adults' experiences of misfit in everyday life provide the starting point for examining these system-level processes. In particular, the research explores:
Older adults' experiences: how older adults experience misfit while pursuing everyday activities involving services and technologies.
How misfit is produced: how connected practices within marketing systems shape service demands that conflict with a person's needs, resources or circumstances.
Recognition, responsibility and response: how marketing-system actors recognise misfit, connect it to the practices involved, understand responsibility for revising those practices and respond.
Changing practice: how these actors might revise connected practices, with older adults contributing their experiences and assessing proposed changes.
Longer-term system change: how practice revisions might strengthen a marketing system's continuing capacity for renewal.
The doctoral research develops a regenerative marketing systems perspective. This perspective examines how connected actors recognise the effects of their practices, locate responsibility for revising them and develop responses. Regeneration concerns the system's continuing capacity for renewal through changes in the relationships and practices by which it functions.
The empirical research uses this developing perspective to examine misfit and refine the perspective. It distinguishes helping someone resolve an immediate difficulty from revising the practices that shape later encounters and considers how those revisions might contribute to renewal over time.
How the research is being conducted
The research includes planned data collection in the Helsinki region and metropolitan Melbourne, allowing Rihab to investigate these experiences in two different settings.
Data will first be collected through interviews with older adults about everyday activities where a mismatch between their needs, resources or circumstances and what a service or technology asks them to do becomes visible. Where relevant, the research will also involve people who help older adults with these activities.
Selected misfit encounters, the interactions in which misfit becomes visible, will guide tracing of the connected practices and decisions that shaped the service demands involved. This will include speaking with people involved in designing, delivering or governing the relevant services, supported by participant observation where relevant, and relevant service information and policy documents.
Finally, co-design workshops will bring older adults and marketing-system actors together to explore how those practices could be changed. People who support older adults with the activities will participate where relevant. Workshops will use anonymised patterns from selected encounters to develop and assess possible revisions, including who could make them and how they could affect older adults' everyday activities. Findings from Helsinki and Melbourne will first be analysed within each setting and then be used to refine the project's conceptual framework.
Meet the Researcher
Rihab Oubaidah
Rihab Oubaidah is a doctoral researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the University of Vaasa, completing a cotutelle PhD with RMIT University through the DREAM+PLAN Doctoral Network.
Her interdisciplinary background spans architecture, urban planning, sustainable development and public policy. Her research connects people's everyday experiences with the wider systems, services and decisions that shape them, with a particular interest in inclusive and participatory approaches to change.
Who the research is for
The research involves older adults whose everyday activities involve digital services and technologies. Its findings have wider relevance for:
technology and service providers
community and support organisations
local and other levels of government
policymakers
researchers interested in ageing, digital inclusion, consumer wellbeing and marketing systems.
Potential impact
The research aims to connect older adults' experiences of misfit with the practices through which service demands are produced within marketing systems.
By tracing an older person's difficulty back to the practices and decisions that helped produce it, the research could help the actors involved identify recurring problems, understand who shaped the relevant practices and who has the authority and ability to revise them, and work with the people affected to develop better responses.
Over time, this could help actors revise connected practices as people's needs, resources and circumstances change, contributing to more responsive and inclusive systems. The research will identify possible revisions and examine their regenerative potential; their implementation and longer-term effects would require subsequent evaluation.