What's "Resourceful Ageing"?
Connected Resources is a family of modular devices for older adults that enable resourceful combinations of sensors and actuators to hack household objects and make do. Supporting improvisation and autonomy, it was developed within the Resourceful Ageing project.
Who's it for?
The work is relevant to scholars, designers, and technologists working in the field of assistive technologies and exploring themes of resourcefulness, co-performance, and improvisation in relation to digital technologies.
Approach
The project uses thing ethnography to integrate both human and nonhuman perspectives on older people’s practices of resourcefulness. By focusing on the role of objects as active participants in everyday life, this approach allows the project to explore emergent design spaces, where outcomes are not fixed but open-ended and shaped by use.
In this context, technology is not deployed to monitor, predict, or prescribe behaviour. Instead, it becomes a resource for enabling the everyday improvisations, adaptations, and situated know-how of older adults.
This shift emphasizes autonomy and vitality over control and paternalism, recognizing ageing not as decline but as a creative process of making do with available resources, both human and technological.
In the pictures below you can see various combinations of sensors and actuators.
Contribution
Connected Resources makes both conceptual and practical contributions to design research. It explores how machine learning can act as a resource for improvisation and co-performance between humans, technological devices, and material objects.
It also introduces early practices of more-than-human design in relation to technology, shifting away from monitoring and control toward recursive attunements and negotiations between human and nonhuman actors.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This work is part of Resourceful Ageing, an interdisciplinary project funded by a “Research through Design” grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), 2017-2019.
The Resourceful Ageing project contributed to shaping Dutch funding policy and evaluation criteria for Research through Design practices.
It also received the Next Generation Internet 2019 Award for Better Digital Life by the European Commission.