Turning Onions into Stir Fry: Kansei Engineering for Older Adults

Chorong Park, Rua M. Williams

Abstract: Technology often creates friction for older adults in their daily lives and relationships, affecting older adults’ self-image and contributing to frustration and anxiety. We examine older adults’ emotional experiences with technology and explore how Kansei principles might inform better design decisions for this user group. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with older adults and combined these transcripts with over 500 h of field notes from our tech support volunteer program. We then conducted thematic analysis to understand the design decisions which contribute to older adults’ frustrations and joys when using technology. Emotional experiences such as frustration, shame, and fear are more prevalent than feelings of amusement and joy. These feelings are elicited during interactions which conflict with their aging bodies and generate senses of helplessness and incompetence and erode senses of autonomy. We propose a Kansei Engineering-informed approach to imagining alternative designs that can lead to positive emotional experiences and a felt sense of autonomy with and through technology.

External IDs:doi:10.1007/978-981-96-8904-0_31