TALES (Technology, Ageing, Life Experiences and Stories)
Co-Creating Innovations in Digital Storytelling with Older Adults
About the project
Later life can be a time of considerable change. As people move on from the personal and professional roles they have performed for many years, their identities as people who live full lives can become hidden.
Autobiographical storytelling, or life story work, is one strategy that is known to be valuable in later life. With innovations in technology constantly evolving, there are opportunities to extend autobiographical storytelling and create ongoing social interactions centred around the people, places, events, and objects that are core to older adults’ life stories.
This Australian Research Council-funded three-year project (DP240102799) explores how new and emerging technologies can be used to create digital life stories that are interactive and playful, supporting older adults in aging well by supporting social and cultural participation.
This project aims to
Examine
how older adults create and share their stories and assess the role of technologies in facilitating social interactions based on those stories, to identify opportunities for innovation in this area.
Co-Design
innovative forms of digital storytelling with older adult participants, focusing on hybrid games, augmented and virtual reality, and AI-enabled storytelling, and identify the social benefits, ethical challenges, and sociotechnical barriers that each approach involves.
Evaluate
the impact of new forms of digital storytelling in terms of the opportunities they provide for fostering interactions with a broad audience, facilitating social connectedness, and enhancing social wellbeing.
Create
guidelines for the future design and use of interactive and innovative digital storytelling programs to enable all older adults to become storytellers and to encourage diverse audiences to engage with those stories.
In order to ensure there is a place for every story, we must ensure that all people can be storytellers, and that all audiences can experience their stories. Commonwealth of Australia, 2023
Project team
Professor Jenny Waycott leads a program of research examining how technologies can be designed and used for social connection and emotional wellbeing in later life. Her research covers a range of technologies used by older adults and in aged care settings, including virtual reality, social robots, video calling, and mobile applications designed for specific purposes (e.g., music therapy). She has published extensively on this topic and regularly presents her work at HCI and ageing conferences and in public forums.
Dr Melissa Rogerson is internationally recognised for her research into boardgame play and hybridity, and has completed over 120 media interviews. She is interested in exploring how telling and experiencing people’s life stories can be fun and playful, and in how we can use physical pieces like cards as a gateway to people’s stories.
Dr Lucy Sparrow is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction with the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of ethics, digital technology, and games. Her award-winning thesis combined these interests, exploring the ethics of multiplayer gameplay and design. She is a director of the Melbourne Academic Games, Play and Interactive Entertainment (MAGPIE) group and is chief investigator of the AI Ally project, an eSafety funded initiative that is co-designing an AI tool to help girls, women and gender diverse individuals aged 14-25 manage online harassment.
Professor Martin Gibbs has an abiding research interest in communities, technologies, and everyday life. A member of the University of Melbourne’s DeathTech research team, he is currently investigating how people use interactive technologies such as video games, community networks, and mobile phones for convivial and sociable purposes in diverse situations.
Dr Wei Zhao is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on designing and using digital technology to support the psychosocial well-being of older adults, particularly through engagement in meaningful activities. He has published and presented his research at numerous prestigious international conferences in HCI, including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).