10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17502
application/pdf
2038-3460
17502
1
en
Linda Tonolli
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Juliane Jarke, Co-creating Digital Public Services for an Ageing Society. Evidence for Usercentric Design, Springer, 2021
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Book Reviews
2021-11-01
2023-06-27
2021-11-01
2023-10-19
136-139
TS
Linda Tonolli
2021/11/01
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17502
136
Università di Trento
2038-3460
1
en
139
Juliane Jarke, Co-creating Digital Public Services for an Ageing Society. Evidence for Usercentric Design, Springer, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17502/16347
12
136                                                               Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)
Despret, V. (2020b) “Inhabiting the phonocene with birds”, in Latour, B and
       Weibel, P. (eds.), in Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on
       Earth, Cambridge, the MIT Press, pp. 254-259.
Granjou C. and Mauz I. (2009) Quand l'identité de l'objet-frontière se construit
       chemin faisant. Le cas de l'estimation de l'effectif de la population de loups
       en France, in “Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances”, 3(1), pp. 29-49.
Haraway, D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
      Press.
Law, J. and Lynch, M. (1988) Lists, field guides, and the descriptive organization
        of seeing: birdwatching as an exemplary observational activity, in “Human
        studies”, 11(2/3), pp. 271-303.
Law, J. and Lien, M. E. (2012) Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology, in “So-
        cial Studies of Science”, 43(3), pp. 363-378.
Singleton, V. (2012) When contexts meet: Feminism and accountability in uk, cat-
        tle farming, in “Science, Technology, & Human Values”, 37(4), pp. 404-
        433.



                                       ***
   Juliane Jarke
Co-creating Digital Public Services for an Ageing Society. Evidence for User-
centric Design, Cham, Springer, 2021, pp. 228

Linda Tonolli Università di Trento

    In recent years the Science and Technology Studies (STS) debate about
how ageing, technology and society are intertwined is rapidly emerging, as
living conditions improve and life expectancy increases, especially in
wealthy countries. The growing importance of this phenomenon is exten-
sively supported by EU and national fundings that promote projects to de-
sign new technologies and services for the aging society. These research
trajectories lay on normative narratives that describe ageing as a problem
to fix, and so they lead to an extensive development of assistive technolo-
gies that strongly focus only on a medicalized, individual dimension of ag-
ing (Cozza et al. 2017). These approaches picture humans as isolated bio-
logical machines, forgetting that humans are also (and especially) social be-
ings, made by their relationships with others and the context they live (and
age) in. In this context, STS researchers have been fruitful in highlighting
two aspects of the phenomenon of active ageing technologies. The first as-
pect is that STS scholars analyzed how behind the apparent healthy and
Book Reviews                                                               137
positive attitude of the “active ageing” policy concept lay neo-liberal eco-
nomic logics, of which the “silver economy” represents their intent of cap-
ital exploitation towards a specific tailored social group (e.g.: Peine and
Neven 2019). The second aspect is that STS analyze design as a phenome-
non and designers as key agents in the construction of new collective im-
aginaries. For example, Lucy Suchman (2007) reminds us that information
technologies are “sociomaterial configurations” that join together social
imaginaries and materialities. From these two starting points, STS critical
scholars such as Juliane Jarke stand for re-configuring the engagement with
technology design for older adults (and our older selves). Inspiring social
gerontology and human-computer interaction (HCI), these scholars ques-
tion the representations of “age” that are often scripted into technologies
and call attention to the risky consequences of their use, such as the rein-
forcement of negative ageing stereotypes and social discrimination. Involv-
ing older adults at the very beginning of a design process, allows to re-
configure implicit stereotypes, negotiating together with the older partici-
pants the “rules of the game”, setting common goals and agendas and in-
spiring enthusiasm, desirability and sense of ownership in respect of the
design process and outcome. Designing alternatives to the traditional sys-
tem design approach of service provider-client opens up to meaningful
ways of “success”. This is one reason why interdisciplinary research, which
includes fields such as design, social sciences and computer science, adopts
more collaborative and inclusive approaches to design. In fact, the aim of
these research approaches is to co-create strategies and artifacts (digital
and not) together with the people that will use them. These projects are
grounded in the tradition of field studies, in which ethnographic intents
combine with design purposes.
    It is the case of Juliane Jarke’s book, Co-creating Digital Public Services
for an Ageing Society. Evidence for User-centric Design. Coming from a
very interdisciplinary background (that includes STS studies, Media stud-
ies, Informatics and Philosophy), Juliane Jarke has been working since
2014 as senior researcher at Bremen University, where she is also associated
with the Institute for Information Management (ifib) and the Centre for
Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI). Her research
focuses on public sector innovation, digital (in)equalities and participatory
design. From 2016 to 2019, she led a work package on Participatory Design
in Civic Tech and Open Data in the EU-funded project MobileAge. In this
action research project, her research group studied effective methods for
co-creating digital public services with and for senior citizens. Her book is
at the cutting-edge between STS and co-design, offering an uncommon in-
depth account of three co-design projects which are part of MobileAge.
Project after project, she builds an incremental narrative of learning out-
comes that can serve as guidelines and advice for researchers and practi-
tioners with similar design intents.
    The aim of the book is to address the lack of engagement of older adults
138                                                            Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

in co-design projects, both on a theoretical and on a practical level. There-
fore, the book opens with an in-depth literature review that frames the ag-
ing phenomenon through an interdisciplinary prism (first chapter, Ageing
Societies and Technological Innovation). From unfolding concepts such as
Ageing Society and Old Age, Jarke outlines the intimate relationship be-
tween ageing identities as socio-cultural constructs and information tech-
nologies, and how they shape each other, underlining the performative
power of technology design and use. In particular, the author’s perspective
considers ageing as “a material-discursive practice”, adopting Karen
Barad’s perspective, and supporting the concept of “media generation”
(Bolin 2017) in order to distinguish across generations – i.e. every genera-
tion grows up sharing experience through media that shape that particular
generation in unique ways. Therefore, there is not a unique definition or
meaning of ageing, because it is a phenomenon that depends on the con-
text (as design is, as it will be shown in the project chapters). Among the
policy responses to ageing societies, the author focuses her work on the
World Health Organization initiative “Age-friendly cities and communi-
ties”. Jarke depicts the complexity of digitalization under different aspects,
underling that the WHO model does not address technology enough to
support people’s later life.
    In the second chapter, Co-creating Digital Public Services, the author
articulates her proposal to fill the gap in an ideal inclusive process of digital
transformation: through co-design. In fact, if social inclusion is also a mat-
ter of digital inclusion, in order to achieve digital inclusion, a design pro-
cess needs to allow digital participation. The design approaches to do this
vary, and Jarke outlines them using Arnstein’s notorious Ladder for Par-
ticipation essay to explain the different types of participation and how they
are translated into design approaches, such as system design, user-centred
design, co-design and participatory design. The author also shows how in
the design history of digital public services, the tendency to move from an
“administration centric” to a “customer-driven” approach should become
predominant. Like in the first chapter, where she was pointing out the lack
of involvement of older adults in the design of technologies, in this chapter
Jarke documents the lack of citizens involvement in the design of digital
public services, standing for a more inclusive and democratic design.
    Moving to the more “practical” chapters, the chapters from the third
to the sixth are dedicated to three projects that were part of the MobileAge
EU project. All the projects share common topics such as mapping, the use
of municipality open data and building friendly neighborhoods. The first
two projects described in the fourth and fifth chapters, Co-creation in
Practice I: Co-creating a Digital Neighbourhood Guide (Bremen Oster-
holz) and Chapter 5 Co-Creation in Practice II: Co-creating a Digital
Walking Guide (Bremen Hemelingen), were conducted by the author and
her research group, in Bremen (Germany). Instead, the third project based
in Zaragoza (Spain) and described in the sixth chapter, Co-creation in
Book Reviews                                                                    139
Practice III: Co-creating Ageing-Friendly Routes (Zaragoza) has been in-
cluded by the author for its comparative interest, even though she did not
conduct the project, but participated to its planning and evaluation.
    Jarke’s book examines the MobileAge EU project under three aspects
of analysis, evaluation and comparison: the politics of participation (which
actors participate in the projects and how), sharing expertise (initial users
become co-creators), enabling change (on a personal, social and digital
level). These aspects highlight how power dynamics and interdependencies
between stakeholders play in design processes, and need to be taken care-
fully into consideration when planning a co-design process.
    In conclusion, this book is for those who have just begun research in
the field of design, ageing and technology and look for a good companion
to navigate the state of art and to study examples of well-tailored co-design
projects. In fact, the first two chapters offer a robust theoretical frame of
the main research and design issues in this field, while the following ones
provide extensive descriptions of projects the author was involved in. Sim-
ilarly, this book is a precious resource also for senior researchers and co-
design practitioners, since the projects accounts (from the third to the sixth
chapter), that constitute the main body of the book, offer in-depth details
of the design processes that STS researchers, designers, stakeholders, com-
puter scientists, can find informative and inspiring.

References

Arnstein, S.R. (1969) A ladder of citizen participation, in “Journal of the American
       Institute of Planners”, 35 (4), pp. 216-224.
Bolin, G. (2019) Media generations: experience, identity and mediatised social
       change, London, Routledge.
Cozza, M., De Angeli, A., and Tonolli, L. (2017) Ubiquitous technologies for older
       people, in “Personal and Ubiquitous Computing”, 21 (3), pp. 607-619.
Peine, A. and Neven, L. (2019) From intervention to co-constitution: new direc-
       tions in theorizing about aging and technology, in “The Gerontologist”, 59
       (1), pp. 15-21.
Suchman, L. A. (2007) Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated ac-
      tions. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.



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