Insights from Co-Design of Underwater Telepresence and Extended Reality Technologies with Digitally Excluded Older Adults

The Intergenerational Co-design of Novel Technologies In Coastal Communities (ICONIC) project is running co-design workshops with older (50+) and younger people (16-30) to design technologies suitable for older people’s wellbeing. We aim to design four novel technologies in extended reality (XR), underwater telepresence (UT), social games and voice interaction. This late breaking report focuses on workshop results for the first two technologies. Ten workshops were held (August 23 - February 24) involving 24 older people and 12 younger people. Our co-design methods were demonstrably feasible although recruiting younger people is difficult. Nevertheless, the thematic and content analysis showed the importance of intergenerational collaboration for the participants, a consistent desire for social interaction aspect in technology design, the existence of a duality between the desire for immersion and connection to physical reality, as well as special attention to cost and accessibility. As an outcome of the co-design process, we are developing prototype systems streaming live video from an underwater 360° camera underwater in the sea and XR presence in a historical building. We discuss some of the crucial considerations of the technology co-design process such as balancing the introduction of existing technology to raise awareness versus idea generation. Insights obtained from ICONIC’s co-design workshops are relevant to researchers designing information and communication technologies for older people.