Skeuomorphic Reassurance: Personhood and Dementia
User interface design needs to be revisited for people with dementia. This paper introduces ‘skeuomorphic reassurance’ as a guiding principle for human interfaces in technological design, particularly for older people and people with dementia (PwD). Skeuo
- PDF / 156,347 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 85 Downloads / 145 Views
2
)
1 Centre for Digital Business, University of Salford, Salford, UK [email protected], [email protected] School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia [email protected]
Abstract. User interface design needs to be revisited for people with dementia. This paper introduces ‘skeuomorphic reassurance’ as a guiding principle for human interfaces in technological design, particularly for older people and people with dementia (PwD). Skeuomorphs exhibit decorative design elements remi‐ niscent of ‘parent’ objects that incorporated such design elements because they were structurally integral. The philosophy of personhood is discussed in the context of dementia, concluding that the subjective character of conscious mental processes is an irre‐ ducible feature of reality, and the persistence of personhood in PwD supports this assertion. Assistive technologies that aid carers, as well as PwD, need to ensure that skeuomorphic reassurance is incorporated in their design, not least because older people and PwD need recognisable interfaces today, but because the problems today’s over-65s have with digital technologies may not go away, but re-present themselves generation after generation, unless skeuomorphic reassurance is built into their design. Keywords: Person centred care · Family centred care · Applied ethics · Personhood · Dementia · Digital inclusion
1
Introduction
As the literature grows concerning older people with neuro-cognitive declines, user interface design needs to be revisited. This paper aims to promote the concept of ‘skeuo‐ morphic reassurance’ as a guiding principle for human interfaces in technological devel‐ opment and design, seen most recently in Apple’s smart watch design [10]. It does so set in the context of a number of developments in the contemporary social landscape: (i) an ageing world population, (ii) the persistence of personhood amidst the occurrence of dementia in otherwise physically healthy older people, (iii) the accelerating rapidity of technological development, (iv) the importance of combating digital exclusion of the elderly as an on-going, and not merely a one-off imperative. We shall address each of these issues in turn. This constitutes, of necessity, a position paper, rather than one presenting results of research, laying out the conceptual background behind a planned
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved D. Kreps et al. (Eds.): HCC12 2016, IFIP AICT 474, pp. 61–71, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44805-3_6
62
D. Kreps et al.
research programme aimed at discovering what the guiding principles - and associated techniques - of skeuomorphic reassurance might be. A skeuomorph is any object that exhibits decorative design elements reminiscent of ‘parent’ or antecedent objects that incorporated such design elements because they were structurally integral [67]. The moulded stitching on a plastic jacket recalling the act
Data Loading...
