Background and Objectives: There is a lack of understanding of how older adults’ involvement and participation matters in actual design practice. This systematic literature review investigates existing empirical studies involving older users during the design of technologies and explores the nature and consequences of involving older people.Research Design and Methods: Our literature review is informed by the guidelines of the PRISMA statement. We examined the included studies by means of thematic content analysis to identify the nature of older users’ involvement and existing evidence on what consequences it has.Results: In total, 40 empirical studies published in the period 2014–2018 are included in the review. Most empirical studies involve older people from local networks, with underlying stereotypical images and at lower levels of participation. The results reveal three main consequences of involving older users: learning, adjusted design, and an increased sense of participation. Furthermore, we found that user involvement is a structured process whose outcomes are contingent on a range of premises.Discussion and Implications: Synthesizing the results, we develop the concept of user involvement and present an analytical framework. Our results have implications for researchers and policy makers, since they throw into question the widely held assumption that involving older people inevitably yields beneficial outcomes.

In this study, we explore the constitution of user representations of robots in design practice. Using the results of ethnographic research in two robot laboratories, we show how user representations emerge in and are entangled with design activities. Our study speaks to the growing popularity of and investment in robotics, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that it is often difficult for designers and engineers to develop accurate ideas about potential users of such technologies. However, the social context of robots and design settings themselves have received significantly less attention. Based on our laboratory ethnographies, we argue that the practices in which engineers are engaged are important as they can shape the kind of user images designers create. To capture these dynamics, we propose two new concepts: ‘image-evoking activities’ as well as ‘user image landscape’. Our findings provide pertinent input for researchers, designers and policy-makers, as they raise questions with regards to contemporary fears of robots replacing humans, for the effectiveness of user involvement and participatory design, and for user studies in STS. If design activities co-constitute the user images that engineers develop, a greater awareness is needed specifically of the locales in which the design of robots and other types of technologies takes place.

Involving older people through co-design has become increasingly attractive as an approach to develop technologies for them. However, less attention has been paid to the internal dynamics and localized socio-material arrangements that enact this method in practice. In this paper, we show how the outcomes that can be achieved with user involvement often pertain to learning, but their content can differ significantly based on how the approach is implemented in practice. Combining explorative, qualitative findings from co-design conducted in four countries (Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden), we illustrate how different types of learning occurred as design workshops engaged the experiences and skills of older people in different ways. Our findings make visible how learning can be a core outcome of co-design activities with older adults, while raising awareness of the role of the power relations and socio-material arrangements that structure these design practices in particular ways. To benefit from the full wealth of insights that can be learned by involving older people, deeper knowledge is needed of the implicit features of design, the materials, meanings, and power aspects involved.