What's "Connected Resources"?
Connected Resources is a set of devices designed for older adults that allows them to hack and adapt household objects into original and resourceful combinations. The devices enable users to create their own sensor-output pairings, encouraging improvisation and autonomy in their daily lives.
Who's it for?
The project is relevant for designers, technologists and researchers exploring resourcefulness and improvisation within assistive technologies. It will also be useful for anyone interested in promoting improvisation and resourcefulness around digital technologies, particularly in the context of aging.
Approach
The project uses Thing Ethnography to imagine the perspectives of both objects and the people who interact with them. This approach allowed innovative and flexible concepts to emerge that were open-ended and shaped by their use. A key part of the concept is deploying technologies that promote everyday improvisation, adaptation and know-how. This contrasts with more traditional assistive technologies for older adults that tend to monitor, predict, and prescribe behaviour. Connected Resources celebrates aging as a creative process full of opportunities to be resourceful with technology, promoting autonomy and vitality.
The images show various combinations of sensors and actuators from the project.
Contribution
Connected Resources demonstrates how machine learning can act as a resource for improvisation and co-performance between humans, technological devices, and material objects. Another important contribution is towards the practices of More-Than-Human Design. The project showed how to practically use approaches like Thing Ethnography to design technologies that allow active negotiation between people and the technologies they use.
Why is it in the Observatory?
Alongside its core contributions, Connected Resources is notable because it contributed to shaping funding policies and evaluation criteria for Research through Design practices in the Netherlands, helping to legitimise and promote Design Research. It also received the Next Generation Internet 2019 Award for Better Digital Life from the European Commission, demonstrating how Design Research can influence both academic practices and policy while creating meaningful impact for users.