The aging society has arrived, and more and more older adults are living in a nursing home. However, institutional care settings are often described as places where residents suffer from social isolation. Under this context, we describe the process of translating into fieldwork into interactive systems facilitating elderly residents’ social interaction and wellbeing. Comprehensive semi-structured interviews with older residents and caregivers were first conducted in a Dutch nursing home, aiming at understanding the status of their social interaction. The context of a typical elderly resident’s social interaction was then generated, and based on which three interactive systems focusing on different aspects of their social interaction were designed and deployed. The paper finally concludes with design considerations for promoting social interaction and wellbeing of older adults living in the nursing home.

In this paper we consider the current lively discussion on how and whether to formalize the Research through Design (RtD) approach and argue that the role of the artefact is essential but underexposed in this discussion. Through three case studies we investigate the different roles the artefact can have within RtD and show that design relevant knowledge is in the process of designing the actual artefact, in the artefact itself as well as in its evaluation. Considering the role of the artefact more thoroughly portrays insights on how theory is built in the RtD approach, as well as in matters that do or do not make sense to formalize in the first place. We discuss this at the end of the paper through identifying similarities and differences between the three cases.

The number of older adults residing in nursing institutions is increasing, and many of them experience social isolation. The social interaction of older adults constitutes a complex system that involves multiple stakeholders, including fellow residents, caregivers, members of the local community, etc. This paper proposes an Interactive Gallery, comprising a cluster of scenery collectors and an interactive installation resembling a gallery. It aims to promote social interaction among nursing home residents and members of the local community, as well as between senior residents within the nursing home. We conducted a field study that employed behavior observation and semi-structured interviews. Our findings show that the Interactive Gallery had a positive impact on the social interaction of senior participants, and it also stimulated their interest in sharing their experiences with individuals outside of the nursing home. The implications of our field study are significant. We highlight the social interaction system and behavioral characteristics of senior residents, strategies for enhancing social interaction within the nursing home, and strategies for promoting social interaction between senior residents and members of the local community. The Interactive Gallery presents a novel approach to addressing the issue of social isolation among senior residents in nursing homes. Our field study findings demonstrate its potential to improve the quality of life of seniors by promoting social interaction and engagement.

Very young non- or hardly-speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimulate interaction with their environment in order to develop their communicative and linguistic skills. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems can help this process, provided that they are tuned to this specific user group. LinguaBytes is a research programme, which aims at developing an interactive and adaptive educational toy that stimulates the language and communicative skills of multiple-handicapped children with a developmental age of 1–4 years. In this article we show which guidelines we consider essential for developing this tool. We have developed several concepts based on these guidelines, of which we elucidate Explorascope (E-scope). E-scope consists of a tangible toy-like interface that is adaptable to an individual child with respect to his or her cognitive, linguistic, emotional and perceptual-motor skills. A first user test shows that E-scope is promising and useful for this user group.

In this paper, we describe our ongoing work towards understanding how interactive comics could affect time perception. An interactive comic story, The Dreaming Wine, has been created based on our current understanding of interactive comics, time perception and the relation between both. As a starting point for our research, we conducted an experiment on whether the amount of panels would affect the time perception of the comic reader. A list of principles was applied in splitting comic panels. The findings of the experiment are expected to provide a better understanding of how panels in interactive comics have an effect on the reader’s time perception.