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Abstract
This study analyses 'Do-It-Yourself' (DIY) gerontechnologies and shows that they can be viable and valuable alternatives to 'ready-made' gerontechnologies. Using the concept of innosumption, we analyze the work of care workers in gerontechnology showrooms in Norway. We show how and why care workers will sometimes advice older adults to assemble DIY-gerontechnologies. Such DIY-gerontechnologies are not high-tech solutions made by technology producers, but creative solutions that older adults' suit to their specific needs and assemble for themselves from mundane objects that are available in shops. So far, analyses of the design, implementation and use of gerontechnologies have almost exclusively focused on professionally designed and produced 'ready-made' gerontechnologies. But for various reasons, ready-made gerontechnologies often do not fit in well with the lives of older people. In such cases, care workers guide older people to the innosumption of DIY-gerontechnologies that offer workable solutions that are useful, quickly implemented, easily understandable and often cheap. We show that and how the existence of DIY-gerontechnologies questions the reasons behind the strong and widely accepted assumption that only high-tech innovations are a proper solution to the needs of older people.
Highlights
In Western Europe, the population aged 65 or higher is expected to increase from 18.5% in 2010 to 27.3% in 2035, and the population aged 80 or higher will increase from 5.1% to 8.6% in the same period (United Nations 2013)
In the context of the challenges posed by demographic ageing, technological innovation has emerged as a key theme as nation states have sought for solutions (Cagnin et al 2012, De Smedt et al 2013, Mort et al 2012, Neven 2011, Neven and Peine 2017, O€ stlund 2004, Peine and Herrmann 2012)
This study shows that DIY gerontechnologies which come into being as a result of the work of innosumers are common alternatives to ready-made gerontechnologies
Summary
In Western Europe, the population aged 65 or higher is expected to increase from 18.5% in 2010 to 27.3% in 2035, and the population aged 80 or higher will increase from 5.1% to 8.6% in the same period (United Nations 2013). Schot and Albert de la Bruheze’s (2003) work is embedded in a long and prolific line of thinking in Science and Technology Studies (STS), that has highlighted the agency of users in transforming the purpose and meaning of technologies during use (for overviews, see Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003; Peine and Herrmann 2012) This literature has shown how it is futile to talk about a technology, singular, but has explored the complex arrangements of practice, space and materiality that configure technologies, plural, as they are appropriated at different sites of use (De Laet and Mol 2000, Suchman 2007). The notion of innosumption offers a possibility to expand the analytical scope by focusing on the agentic capacity of care professionals, older people and others to make their own gerontechnologies
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