The Adventures of Older Authors: Exploring Futures through Co-Design Fictions

This paper presents co-design fiction as an approach to engaging users in imagining, envisioning and speculating not just on future technology but future life through co-created fictional works. Design fiction in research is often created or written by researchers. There is relatively little critical discussion of how to co-create design fictions with end-users, with the concomitant opportunities and challenges this poses. To fill this gap in knowledge, we conducted co-design fiction workshops with nine older creative writers, utilising prompts to inspire discussion and engage their imaginative writing about the trend towards tracking and monitoring older people. Their stories revealed futures of neither dystopia nor utopia but of social and moral dilemmas narrating their wish not just to "maintain their independence", but a palpable desire for adventure and very nuanced senses of how they wish to take control. We discuss inherent tensions in the control of the co-design fiction process; balancing the author's need for freedom and creativity with the researcher's desire to guide the process toward the design investigation at hand.