10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17474
This special issue contributes to the new academic field known as Socio-gerontechnology, which has emerged at the cross-section of STS and Age Studies. All contributions published in the following pages explore what happens when theories meet practice in the relation between ageing and technology, by pointing out the role of design(ers) in configuring and reconfiguring such a relation. In line with the so-called “engaged program” in STS, these articles address different topics of political importance and pragmatic relevance. Indeed, they share the critique of ageist images that underlie public and specialist discourses around ageing and technology. By combining the emancipatory thrive of critical studies of age and ageing and the nuanced STS approach to the study of the entanglements of ageing and technology, this special issue offers a collection of theoretical elaborations and methodological considerations developed along with empirical analyses. Overall, they explore the practical politics of technology, within the growing field of Socio-gerontechnology.
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
When Theory meets Practice in Entanglements of Ageing and Technology
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Editorial
2021-03-09
2023-06-27
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Alexander Peine
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17474
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When Theory meets Practice in Entanglements of Ageing and Technology
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                                                                    Guest Editors’ Introduction
                                                                                                       5




When Theory meets Practice in
Entanglements of Ageing and
Technology
  Michela Cozza                             Britt Östlund                     Alexander Peine
    Mälardalen University             Royal Institute of Technology, KTH          Utrecht University



     Abstract: This special issue contributes to the new academic field known
     as Socio-gerontechnology, which has emerged at the cross-section of STS
     and Age Studies. All contributions published in the following pages explore
     what happens when theories meet practice in the relation between ageing
     and technology, by pointing out the role of design(ers) in configuring and
     reconfiguring such a relation. In line with the so-called “engaged program”
     in STS, these articles address different topics of political importance and
     pragmatic relevance. Indeed, they share the critique of ageist images that
     underlie public and specialist discourses around ageing and technology. By
     combining the emancipatory thrive of critical studies of age and ageing and
     the nuanced STS approach to the study of the entanglements of ageing and
     technology, this special issue offers a collection of theoretical elaborations
     and methodological considerations developed along with empirical analyses.
     Overall, they explore the practical politics of technology, within the grow-
     ing field of Socio-gerontechnology.

     Keywords: critical               studies;      design;     policy;    Socio-gerontechnology;
     stereotypes.

     Submitted: December 2, 2020 – Accepted: December 9, 2020

     Corresponding author: Michela Cozza, Mälardalen University, School of
     Business, Society and Engineering (EST), Västerås, Sweden. Email:
     michela.cozza@mdh.se




    Over the last two decades or so, the intersection of demographic age-
ing and technological change has received increasing attention by policy
makers and academics. In European, national and global policy making,
we see a trend to make old age policy in conjunction with innovation or
digitalization policy (Neven and Peine, 2017). In Europe, for instance,
large scale innovation and technology development programs fund re-

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
11 (2) pp. 5-11 - ISSN 2038-3460
                                                         2020
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6                                                           Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

search that explores how development in robotics, sensoring, artificial in-
telligence, and the like can be brought to bear on the lives of older peo-
ple, and in particular support what is widely discussed in policy discours-
es as active and healthy ageing or ageing in place.
     The notion of active ageing is, of course, a long-standing and contest-
ed one. McLean (2011), for instance, dates it back to the late 1990s, when
the World Health Organization (WHO) began to promote the passage
“from a ‘needs-based’ approach of passivity to a proactive ‘rights-based’
approach that encourages participation and ‘equality of opportunity and
treatment’” (p. 317). Lassen and Moreira (2014) point out that, while
there is no agreement on a specific definition of active ageing, it is a poli-
cy concept that “usually refers to individual or collective strategies for op-
timising economic, social and cultural participation throughout the life
course” (p. 33). According to this perspective, the active ageing concept
is widely related to the functional capacity and engagement in social and
productive activities throughout the life course. Such a life-style is meant
as disability prevention and maintenance of independence, which are key
goals for an ageing population. Critical studies of age and ageing, howev-
er, have long questioned the implicit normativities of the concept, where
the emphasis on activity in later life, although seemingly just an innocent
healthy recommendation at the surface, is rooted in neoliberal politics
that delegate to (older) people the responsibility to function at a higher
level, even when that is difficult or not desired (Katz 2000; Holstein and
Minkler 2003; Katz 2013).
     The normativities of active ageing and the “responsibilisation” (Urban
2017, p. 10) of older people are then also articulated and made opera-
tional in the technology and innovation policy programs driven by an ac-
tive ageing perspective. Peine and Neven (2019) have recently analyzed
this in terms of an interventionist logic: at their core, old age and innova-
tion programs conceive of ageing and later life as largely unexplored terri-
tories for new applications and marketizations of digital technologies. In
this perspective, technologies figure as “prostheses” meant to help older
people fulfil the expectations devised at neoliberal subjects(Callon 2008;
Peine and Moors 2015), enacting them as consumers and as being re-
sponsible for their health at the same time (Katz and Marshall 2018; Gil-
leard and Higgs 2021). But this interventionist logic widely ignores that
ageing and later life have long been enmeshed with various technologies
already (Loe 2011), including digital technologies like smartphones, social
media and fitness trackers (Hebblethwaite 2016; Katz and Marshall 2018;
Gallistl and Nimrod 2020). Such everyday encounters of older people and
their friends, family and care givers with technologies, while increasingly
studied in both Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Age Studies
(Peine and Neven 2020), have been widely ignored by policy makers.
This, we would like to add, also seems to be a missed opportunity to criti-
cally question the normativities of active ageing, and inform policy mak-
ing with more empirically informed accounts of situated practices of ac-
Cozza, Östlund & Peine                                                   7
tive ageing policies and the technologies associated with them (Berg-
schöld et al. 2020; Moreira et al. 2020).
    The intersection of ageing and technology is thus a trending topic and
it has received attention by scholars from the social sciences and the hu-
manities from various domains. This is the new academic field increasing-
ly known as Socio-gerontechnology (Peine et al. 2021), which has
emerged at the cross-section of STS and Age Studies to address “the mul-
tiple and complex intertwinements of ageing and technology that already
exist, and has begun to replace naive bio- and techno-deterministic un-
derstandings of ageing and technology with the emergence of empirical
studies in the design and use of technology by and for older people […]”
(p. 2). A common theme in Socio-gerontechnology is a critique towards
simplistic ideas among policy makers, health-oriented researchers, and
other practitioners that position ageing and technology as separate or
even separable spheres, to explore instead the assemblages and enact-
ments through which they exist only in relation to each other. Here, Age
Studies have been particularly helpful in critiquing and debunking the of-
ten ageist images that underlie public and specialist discourses around
ageing and technology, which implies a critique toward stereotypes that
position older people as incapable and in need of help in relation to tech-
nology (Vines et al. 2015; Neven and Peine 2017); or a critique toward
those normativities implicit to the rhetoric around positive ageing (Katz
2013; Lassen and Moreira 2014), which promote anti-ageing ideals as part
of the legitimation attempts around many technologies targeted at older
people.
    This special issue contributes to this wider landscape of Socio-
gerontechnology with critical studies of ageing and technology relations
in design. In that sense, it builds further on what Cozza (2021) calls the
“agential inseparability of ageing and […] technologies”. That is, contri-
butions in this special issue study “what elderliness means and how spe-
cific meanings of it come to matter at the expense of possible others
through design practices” (p. 71). This is a topic where in particular STS
approaches to the study of ageing and technology have been fruitful, be-
cause they can rely on the established STS tradition that understands de-
sign as “an intervention in practice” (Shove 2014, p. 41) through which
designers configure materials, ideologies, and competences that affect the
everyday life. When thinking about the ageing population and the un-
precedented diffusion of technologies made with older people as the tar-
get group, the relevance of design emerges straightforwardly (Cozza et al.
2019; Cozza et al. 2020).
    What is problematic in the relation between ageing and technology is,
indeed, the role played by design(ers). For a long-time design practice has
been inspired by the mass production doctrine “one size fits all” based on
Dreyfuss’ book, The measure of man (1960), which is widely acknowl-
edged as the starting point for “human factors” in design. The last con-
cept refers to a conception of persons as passive, fragmented, de-
8                                                               Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

personalised, and un-motivated individuals. This is in contrast to a view
of people as “human actors” with personal objectives, aspirations and
agency (Bannon 1991). By bringing this critique into the study of ageing
and design, Coleman et al. (2003, pp. 3-4) point out that:

       it is now apparent that the “universal types” of much 20th century
       design failed those on the margins of society – especially as as-
       sumptions about what is “average” or “normal” have been too of-
       ten based on the stereotype of the young, fit, white, affluent male.

    In response to such perspectives, some design researchers interested
in age and ageing have urged to open the black box of design, and analyse
the configuring and re-configuring of ageing and technology relations in
design by applying STS theories (Frennert and Östlund 2014; Östlund et
al. 2015; Cozza et al. 2020; Jarke 2021). In line with this tradition and
building on Kurt Lewin’s maxim that “there is nothing as practical as a
good theory”, this special issue gathers contributions that explore what
happens when theories meet practice. This purpose can easily be associ-
ated with what is known as the “engaged program” in STS (Sismondo
2008). Indeed, all contributions address different topics of clear political
importance and pragmatic relevance in so far as the interactions between
ageing and technology are treated as a site of study rather than a mode of
analysis. Theoretical elaborations and methodological considerations are
developed along with analyses that, within the growing field of Socio-
gerontechnology, explore the practical politics of technology.
    Nelly Oudshoorn, in her introductory lecture, urges us to move be-
yond approaches to STS that focus exclusively on technologies external to
the body. Instead, she suggests that we need to reflect on “how human-
technology relations may change when technologies move under the
skin”. In particular, she reviews three conceptual trends in the literature –
the rematerializing of cyborgs, constructivist perspectives on vulnerability
and resilience, and intersectionality – to raise important questions for fu-
ture studies on ageing and technology about the reconfiguration of agen-
cy in times when more and more older people become “elderly everyday
cyborgs”.
    Defining age and who is considered to be an old person is crucial as
societal efforts for older citizens are increasingly based on scientific evi-
dence and inclusion in technological development. In their article, Guil-
lem Palà and Gonzalo Correa take as a starting point a conference that
aims to give older people the opportunity to participate in the making of
policies for the digitalization of society. The conference, which opened
with attempts to define age in biological terms and chronological age,
soon encountered difficulties. Using the “assemblages” of relations and
interactions in the conference, the authors could study the configuration
of age in practice, but more so, by launching the concept “infrastructur-
ing”, they show how these subjects and materialized objects are indispen-
Cozza, Östlund & Peine                                                      9
sable components of this assemblage shaping the idea of what it is to be-
come old.
    Care robot ethics contains issues that have so far been overlooked
both in STS user research and in usability experiments based on the mor-
al imperative to first develop ethical guidelines which are then imple-
mented in design as a guarantee of good care. Joni Jaakola, in his article,
points to “ethics in practice” as a way to evaluate human-robot interac-
tions in the care of people diagnosed with dementia. Using an ethno-
graphic approach and script analysis when studying usability experiments
in a care context, the author describes how ethics does not come out of
universal moral values but is configured and based in care practice.
    Elin Siira and colleagues, in their article, present an interesting analy-
sis of how the logics of efficiency and effectiveness and the logics of care
collide and are (partially) reconciled in specific co-productions of
care. Using a case study of a peer-to-peer care initiative – the EU funded
innovation project Give&Take – they unpack the complex and contradic-
tory sociomaterial arrangements that constitute care within social innova-
tions. They highlight in particular how the institutional logics that under-
lie many such initiatives challenged the possibilities to “co-produce op-
portunities for older people to care for each other”. Ultimately, they con-
clude, a perspective on co-production of care practices and institutional
logics may allow practitioners in policy and design to create “co-
productions that serves and benefits from older citizens’ care practices”.
    In her article, Cordula Endter applies a feminist STS perspective to
analyse the politics of configuring older people as users in the design of
technology. By mobilising the concept of “matter of care”, Endter fore-
grounds the power relations and hierarchy that undermine the participa-
tion process and she re-frames caring as a responsible practice of account-
ing for the involvement of older people as users. This leads to question
the goodness of user participation by examining the extent to which user-
centred design actually empowers older people to participate in the de-
sign process and fosters a fit between technology and user needs. The au-
thor points out that actually the “good care” is not addressed to the users,
but to technology, and that user-centred design should be turned into a
matter of care in order to accounts for older people interests and needs
rather than fitting them into the development of technology.
    As Wanka and Gallistl (2021, p. 33) have recently argued, the practi-
cal relevance of STS studies on ageing and technology is often limited by
a focus on “the deconstruction of processes without the aim for emanci-
pation”. For them, the main potential for a social science approach to
ageing and technology lies exactly in the combination of the emancipa-
tory thrive of critical studies of age and ageing and the nuanced approach
of STS to design as configuring situated agencies between humans and
non-humans. This special issue addresses this challenge. Overall, it allows
to see not a conflict between theoretical interests and more pragmatic in-
tentions but a potential overlap in studying ageing and technology.
10                                                              Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

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