Older adults consistently reject digital technology even when designed to be accessible and trustworthy.

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. ---Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

Older adults frequently deploy the concept of distrust when discussing digital technologies, and it is tempting to assume that distrust is largely responsible for the reduced uptake by older adults witnessed in the latest surveys of technology use. To help understand the impact of distrust on adoption behavior, we conducted focus groups with older adults exploring how, in what circumstances, and to what effect older adults articulate distrust in digital technologies. Our findings indicate that distrust is not especially relevant to older adults’ practical decision making around technology (non-)use. The older adults in our study used the language of distrust to open up discussions around digital technologies to larger issues related to values. This suggests that looking to distrust as a predictor of non-use (e.g., in Technology Acceptance Model studies) may be uniquely unhelpful in the case of older adults, as it narrows the discussion of technology acceptance and trust to interactional issues, when their use of distrust pertains to much wider concerns. Likewise, technology adoption should not be viewed as indicative of trust or an endorsement of technology acceptability. Older adults using-while-distrusting offers important insights into how to design truly acceptable digital technologies.

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.

Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice