Postdoctoral work: Enabling for older adults' participation in design 

I have spent my postodoctoral work at WiNeMe/IT for the aging society chair, in Siegen, Germany.  The group pursues socio-informatics, an exciting combination of different fields connected to design necessary for today's world (including HCI, CSCW, participatory design or living labs). The excellent research has been always underlined with a strong emphasis on real world impact; as such identifying project from end-users and communities needs (rather than theory), and through long-term processes, developing understanding of the problems at hand in a communal way (rather than only by the academic researchers). 

My stay in Germany was the more special because it took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which started approximately two months after my arrival.  This meant that instead of the planned long-term and on-site engagement with the older adults at the local computer club or our workshops, which would include hands-on workshops, allowing for us to develop a very needed sense for older adults' learning needs, we had to transfer all our activities online within a relatively short time and with no chance to prepare us. But the special situation may have made it possible for me to shape and understand a topic I became passionate about: enabling participation in design, with special focus on participation in participatory design. Traditionally, participatory design builds on notions of mutual learning. Certain activities has to take place to make this work - by only providing the participants with access to the design space does not automatically lead to genuine participation. 

Situated scaffolding, which reflects that to most effectively support participation is to create temporary structures, which enable the participants to engage with the design activities. These supporting structures are often not possible to fully plan ahead, but will instead depend on how the whole participatory process will develop (reported in Cerna et al. 2022, Situated Scaffolding for Sustainable Participatory Design: Learning Online with Older Adults). During participatory design, it is crucial to enable the participant in learning that they can direct themselves, hence addressing their genuine needs (reported in Cerna et al. 2023, Designing for Self-directed Learning: Co-creating a Demokit with Older Adults). But to be able to understand their own needs, the design facilitators need to create a suitable space, which will allow for the participants and the facilitators to engage in mutually built understanding of each other (reported in Cerna and Müller 2021, Making online participatory design work: Understanding the digital ecologies of older adults). Finally, to make the design outcomes truly sustainable, it is essential to plan for participants’ learning not only during the design process but also consider what others could learn from the produced outcomes of the process; so called didactic prototypes (reported in Cerna and Müller, 2021, Fostering digital literacy through a mobile demo-kit development: Co-designing didactic prototypes with older adults).

Publications from my postdoctoral work

Paluch, R., Cerna, K., Kirschsieper, D., & Müller, C. (2023). Practices of Care in Participatory Design With Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digitally Mediated Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 25, e45750.

Cerna, K., Müller, C., Hunker, M., Hitpass, F., & Randall, D. (2023). Designing for Self-directed Learning: Co-creating a Demokit with Older Adults. Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population, 3–22.

Kaisa Pihlainen, Anja Ehlers, Rebekka Rohner, Katerina Cerna, Eija Kärnä, Moritz Hess, Lisa Hengl, Lotta Aavikko, Susanne Frewer-Graumann, Vera Gallistl & Claudia Müller (2022) Older adults’ reasons to participate in digital skills learning: An interdisciplinary, multiple case study from Austria, Finland, and Germany, Studies in the Education of Adults, DOI: 10.1080/02660830.2022.2133268

Paluch, R., Cerna, K., Volkova, G., Seidler, M., Weiler, T., Obaid, M., & Müller, C. (2022). Robots in heterogeneous contexts: Negotiation of co-creative lifelong learning spaces through participatory approaches. In Proceedings of 20th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).

Cerna, K., Müller, C., Randall, D., & Hunker, M. (2022). Situated Scaffolding for Sustainable Participatory Design: Learning Online with Older Adults. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(GROUP), 1-25. 

Bevilacqua, R., Strano, S., Di Rosa, M., Giammarchi, C., Cerna, K. K., Mueller, C., & Maranesi, E. (2021). eHealth Literacy: From Theory to Clinical Application for Digital Health Improvement. Results from the ACCESS Training Experience. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(22), 11800.

Cerna, K., Paluch, R., Bäumer, F., Ertl, T., & Müller, C. (2021). Transformation of HCI co-research with older adults: researchers’ positionality in the COVID-19 pandemic. Interaction Design and Architecture (s), 27-47.  Paper presentation can be found here.  

Cerna, K., & Müller, C. (2021). Fostering digital literacy through a mobile demo-kit development: Co-designing didactic prototypes with older adults. Adjunct Publication of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction, 1–6. 

Cerna, K. & Müller, C. (2021): Making online participatory design work: Understanding the digital ecologies of older adults. In: Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: The International Venue on Practice-centred Computing on the Design of Cooperation Technologies - Exploratory Papers, Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (ISSN 2510- 2591), DOI: 10.18420/ecscw2021_n22 

Cerna, K. and C. Müller (2021). Going online with older adults: Hands on guide. Accessible here.  

Struzek, D., Cerna, K., Paluch, R., Bittenbinder, S., Müller, C. Reuter, A. … & Vines, J. 2021. Designing for New Forms of Vulnerability: Exploring transformation and empowerment in times of COVID-19. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts), May 08–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. 

Cerna, K., & Müller, C., (2020). Learning for life: A Workshop Report. Introduction. International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), 17 2, (ISN ISSN 1861-4280 ). Link.

Cerna, K., & Müller, C., (2020). From Design Space to Learning Place: Conceptualization for Meta Design Space for and with Older Adults. In Learning for life: A Workshop Report. International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), 17 2, (ISN ISSN 1861-4280 ). Link.

Cerna, K., Dickel, M., Müller, C., Kärnä, E., Gallistl, V., Kolland, F., Reuter, V., Naegele, G., Bevilacqua, R., Kaspar, H., Otto, H. (2020): Learning for life: Designing for sustainability of tech-learning networks of older adults. Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: The International Venue on Practice-centred Computing on the Design of Cooperation Technologies - Exploratory Papers, Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (ISSN 2510-2591), DOI: 10.18420/ecscw2020_ws04 . See a short trailer.