Keywords

1 Introduction

In recent years, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) projects in sensitive contexts have considered how to best conduct and design research with people who might be regarded as vulnerable or positioned as part of marginalized communities such as people living with dementia (Waycott et al. 2015). With HCI research focused on research in real-world settings, researchers have responded by committing to work with bottom-up approaches, including experts and individuals within that community in the digital creation of tools to support participant empowerment (Olivier and Wright 2015). In this chapter, we discuss two studies working with families and individuals living with dementia. In these studies, we explored the opportunities and challenges of designing personalized media experiences that take into account an individual’s history, interests, personality, desires, and their ecology of care (Ryan et al. 2009). Our first section discusses a vibrant and growing body of work in HCI that indicates a clear need for sensitivity in design for people with dementia, which concludes with a focus from cognition to an embodiment in new technologies. We then introduce a) an exploration into designing tailored Virtual Reality (VR) environments for people with dementia that places emphasis on reminiscence and b) a Research Through Design (RTD) methodology exploring media capture of meaningful experiences to support families living with dementia that questions whether approaches that rely on the person’s ability to recognize or articulate past events is an appropriate activity to enhance emotional connection. We conclude this chapter by outlining directions for future research focusing on designing for recognition and the aging body. Concluding with a reflection on our understandings of what it means to design for impact.

2 Moving Away from a Biomedical Deficit Model of Dementia

Traditional accounts of dementia often emphasize its biomedical origins (Leibing Annette 2006). Individuals living with dementia typically experience problems with language, memory, movement, and other abilities (Lindsay et al. 2012). As part of the changes that come with dementia, significant social ramifications can also cause people living with dementia’s experience of the world to worsen (Hampson and Morris 2016). As dementia progresses, it often adds conflict between the person and their surroundings as they can become unfamiliar, and this can also cause difficulties with coexisting with others; this can happen in what was previously a familiar space such as a family home, a local community, or work place (Au et al. 2009; Langdon et al. 2007). Challenges within previously familiar surroundings can cause issues for the person living with dementia who may feel less able to express and explore their identity (John Killick Claire Craig 2012; Kontos 2005). As we live in a society that places a high value on cognitive ability, a diagnosis of dementia can put significant strain on meaningful interactions, relationships, and activities. Authors have argued that when a person has dementia, their cognitive dysfunction erodes our being-in-the-world (Hampson and Morris 2016), which adversely affects a sense of belonging and therefore, a sense of self.

Alternatively, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty (Gallagher 2010; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Spiegelberg 1965) recognized that individuals with a decline in cognitive abilities can continue to experience the world and create meaning (Hampson and Morris 2016). This view is further explored in the context of dementia by Kontos (Kontos et al. 2017; Kontos and Martin 2013) and Twigg (2013). This shift puts the body and embodied practices at the forefront of design. Given the overwhelming focus on cognitive deficits in dementia in design research to date (Lazar et al. 2017a), tasks which leverage creativity and expression can be valuable in allowing creative communication. Bauman and Murray (2014) further this notion by stating that we should consider the person as a whole, including the new experiences and skills which may come with what seem to be deficits:

Being deaf is not automatically defined simply by loss but could also be defined by differences, and in some cases gain. (from Bauman and Murray 2014)

Bauman and Murray are addressing a social stigma of personal self-being lost within those who have cognitive/communication deficits (Bauman and Murray 2014). Murray further highlights the perspective of personhood as a shift away from the unity of sense, but toward social interactions of the person rather than their neurological changes.

3 Creativity with People Living with Dementia

Kitwood (1998) and others have followed person-centered approaches to dementia care that called attention to how we communicate with people living with dementia. Rather than questioning someone’s cognitive abilities, person-centered approaches promote embodiment that brings attention to lived experiences of the body (Kontos and Martin 2013), and non-verbal communication is a key in ensuring the person living with dementia is able to experience their life to the fullest. Technology which focuses on cognitive decline, monitoring, and management may contribute to the feeling of stigmatization that can build social exclusion by depriving the person living with dementia of their personhood and changing their quality of life (Hampson and Morris 2016; Kontos et al. 2018).

However, an integral part of HCI work builds on this view for influencing the self and personhood of the person living with dementia. As a result, design has moved toward improving quality of life (Lazar et al. 2017a, b; Morrissey et al. 2016), supporting inclusion (McNaney et al. 2017; Welsh et al. 2018), evoking emotion (Wallace et al. 2012a, 2013a, b), and engagement through creativity which carefully crafts creative activities, to help foster a heightening of subjective wellbeing, maintaining skills, and providing social engagement. While many creatively oriented technologies have relied on the person’s ability to recognize or articulate past events, as researchers have moved toward the inclusion of the voices of people living with dementia, recent research has similarly begun to question if reminiscence is an appropriate activity to enhance emotional connection. We discuss this in our first case study as one of the lessons learnt from designing personalized VR experiences. With designing for creativity becoming an important shift in design research (John Killick Claire Craig 2012; Morrissey et al. 2016), the potential for virtual or augmented reality environments for people living with dementia may come hand in hand with ways to experience and express creativity. Beyond the creative aspect of the technology, recent studies have begun to explore the way the benefits of the immersive quality of VR can be meditative and calming for people living with dementia (Hodge et al. 2018). While therapeutic uses offer great promises—and where it is of use in cognitive rehabilitation (Schultheis and Rizzo 2001)—more recent research has followed using immersive reality technology as an expressive and creative medium entirely separate from cognitive assessments.

This chapter presents two case studies that explore the use of VR and media experiences with people living with dementia. In our first study, we work closely with 7 participants living with dementia to design VR experiences of their choosing. Following this work, our second study worked with three families living with dementia, which explored how they could create immersive media experiences to capture moments in their lives.

4 Case Study One: Blending the Old with the New

Back in 2017, we began to look at the body of work associated with the use of virtual reality with/for people living with dementia. With consumer VR headsets quickly coming to the market, the technology was picked up by the entertainment industry, and in particular the gaming industry (Cipresso et al. 2018). With a significant focus on the recreational, it was surprising to see a focus on neurological rehabilitation when using VR technology with people living with dementia (Schultheis and Rizzo 2001). By focusing on the growing body of work that has concentrated toward evoking emotion (Olivier and Wallace 2009; Wallace et al. 2012a, 2013), and creativity through technology with people living with dementia, our study aimed to consider how VR experiences for people living with dementia might be sensitively designed to provide comfortable and enriching experiences. Working closely with a local dementia café charity known as Silverline Memories who showed interest in creating VR experiences, we recruited seven participants—three couples or family pairs where one person with living with dementia, and one older man who was attending the workshops on his own with a mild diagnosis of dementia. In this section, we discuss how we designed the VR experiences with our participants, and conclude with opportunities and drawbacks of how we conducted the research.

4.1 Designing Tailored VR Experiences

To explore attitudes toward VR experiences with people living with dementia, we carried out workshops at a dementia café as part of the afternoon tea sessions on Mondays. Dementia Cafés are places where people living with dementia, their families, and friends can come along and be part of a supportive environment that encourages opportunities for sharing experiences. These workshops had been organized to be flexible to co-exist alongside other organized activities within the dementia café. The aim was to get to know the participant, and from getting to know one another, we would then seek to curate a set of tailored VR experiences that would be interesting for the café and its community after we had left.

With VR being relatively new to our participants, we began by introducing a simple VR experience which consisted of being placed in a virtual apartment as participants tried on a Google Cardboard headset. Our decision for an apartment VR experience was decided for its neutral nature; it did not give any low or high expectations for what to expect with VR technology. After participants tried the headset, we spoke about the type of places they would like to see through the VR headset. We used printouts of images to further these conversations, such as images of libraries, museums, forests, and beaches. During the first workshop, we spoke for an extended time with one couple, Thomas and Janet, where Janet was living with dementia. The couple told us about Janet’s preferences for a VR environment that placed an importance on country music. From this, we decided on creating a personalized VR experience that was based on her love for Shania Twain. We also set out to design and develop environments for the dementia café. The first was a beach environment, and the second was a park that took inspiration from a local park which participants had reminisced about in the workshop. Thirdly, as briefly mentioned above, we sought to design a bespoke Shania Twain concert hall experience for Thomas and Janet.

We created all three VR environments in the Unity game engine. We carefully planned the design of our environments in terms of the field of view of the participant. We applied Mike Alger’s (2015) concept of content zones that we have described in Fig. 15.1 to reduce risks of sickness or disorientation and to improve the overall experience for the individuals. At the time, designing realistic VR experiences was limited to using 360-degree cameras. As we wanted to create experiences that may not be available, such as a 360-degree Shania Twain concert, our design of the environment was based on low-poly art that not only can run on low-end hardware (a simple smartphone) but which also provides a very stylized and abstract view of the reality.

Fig. 15.1
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Content zones in VR

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From the data collected from our first workshop, we created sketches based on the ideas and desires that individuals expressed. While we were unable to develop each participant an individual experience, some ideas had been combined into one environment. For example, one participant asked for us to ‘take [her] back to Ireland, to see the beautiful castles again’. While we could not do that, we did create 3D designs of a traditional castle from Irish medieval architecture. We placed it in the park environment that many of the participants expressed interest in (see Fig. 15.2).

Fig. 15.2
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Park environment including an Irish castle

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In our second workshop, we returned to the dementia café to try out our three different environments focused on the group at large: the beach with a horse running along the sand and a park based on the local park nearby. Both environments were completed with spatial audio captured from the locations the environments were based.

4.2 Lighthouse, Rocks, Sand, Sea, Boat!

With encouragement from her daughter, Lucy, who is living with dementia, tried the beach experience and started listing what she could see—‘lighthouse, rocks, sand, sea, boat!’—as she rotated around and became the active observer in the VR experience. Lucy was not a passive observer in her experience, but in fact, the focal point driving the experience in all its richness. Lucy continued to talk about the experience to her daughter, which added toward a shared experience for the two. In this way, the technology acted as a novel experience that provided an excuse or conduit for conversation—similar to ‘ticket to talk’ (Welsh et al. 2018) as discussed in Chap. 4 (Foley 2020). They are not the only couple who found the opportunity to share meaningful experiences. Many, if not all participants, expressed a wish to be able to share in the same live VR experience as their partner or parent. When asked about this, participants indicated that meaningful shared experiences with their loved one with dementia had changed recently or decreased in frequency.

For example, Linda, whose husband Michael is living with dementia, mentioned that the couple no longer drove and had to use public transport. This meant that the two could not visit favored locations together, and so indicated that the VR park and beach could be used to supplement their recreational activities and allow them to experience a semblance of the sorts of activities which used to mean very much to them. Having the carers experience the environment first allowed carers to help direct their loved one around the environment by being able to probe specific interactions in the environment that the person living with dementia may have missed. For example, one carer started asking questions around what they could see or if they saw the horse walk past on the beach. In addition to this kind of shared experience would be an external screen that displays the same view as the headset. Recently, with the increased interest of Facebook on VR headsets, with the Oculus series, being able to stream your headsets display to your phone is significantly more accessible than it was in 2017. A suggested interaction toward VR shared experiences would be for carers to be able to interact with the VR environments through their external display alongside the person living with dementia driving the experience from the VR headset. However, when designing aspects of training or testing into VR environments, they should be separate from those environments that aim to be recreational. To implement aspects of training or testing into these environments would mean returning to a medicalized view of the person with dementia as a set of deficits, rather than a fully realized person with needs and desires (Hodge et al. 2018).

4.3 Reflections and Outcomes

From our initial workshops two years ago, our research into VR has continued to bring up themes and conversations around feeling isolated or the fear of looking silly. This tendency of feeling silly in VR is relatively common across many who have tried VR. While this is not focused purely on dementia, a diagnosis of dementia can heighten these feelings as dementia progresses. Nolan et al. (2006) reported examples of people living with dementia feeling embarrassment and shame if others became aware of their dementia. Nolan expands further that stigma and embarrassment become further apparent in fear of people witnessing ‘inappropriate behavior in public’. With VR being isolating and looking silly, it is not surprising that we had participants feeling uncertain about taking part in activities, as a way to protect their dignity. Beyond the remarks of VR headsets looking silly, participants expressed concerns of comfortability and weight. In 2017, we used a Google Cardboard headset which is not comfortable, but many preferred to use this as it was lightweight and was comfortable to hold. Two years later, we have seen massive strides toward comfortable and attractive headsets, especially ones that do not require wires that connect to a computer. However, they remain moderately on the heavier side, and while attractive, they can tend to look remarkably futuristic and off-putting. Future designs could benefit from thinking about how headsets could fit into spaces and look normal—e.g., by embedding the display into a set of binoculars or a spectacle with a handle.

For the participants, VR was a novelty and technology they had not had the opportunity to experience. While the concerns above had participants reluctant to try the VR experiences, their view of the technology changed after they tried it. In particular, our personalized design of the Shania Twain concert hall for Janet and Thomas had some initial concerns with Janet having ‘the patience to hold the [headset] for a long time’. As we set the VR experience up and handed it to Janet, Thomas initially aided her in holding the VR headset:

Straight away [Janet] started to sing. She was singing to the tune and attempted to repeat the lyrics… [and] changed her body language completely. It went from rather static, to movements that captured the tempo of the music. Janet held up her hands to try to hold the Google Cardboard as well, which indicated she didn’t want to stop the experience. [Afterwards], she seemed very happy and just from being around her, you could see her mood had changed completely. (Hodge et al. 2018)

While Janet’s experience was heightened by her ability to recall the Shania Twain song, she got to experience it in a completely new way. While her verbal abilities are limited, other means of communicating became apparent. Janet’s interests, body movement, and overall socialness in the café significantly changed after experiencing the concert hall. The bespoke design that placed Janet at the forefront of the design, and who could drive the experience, has a freeing effect that is pleasurable for participants who can engage in enjoying activities; lately, reflecting on the experience, Thomas mentions that Janet has ‘always sang and whistled. She can sing along to songs as long as she remembers the words. The aesthetic of the theatre was a great idea and gave a great sense of space’.

While we speak positively about the use of VR in this case study, it does not go without saying that this was trialed with a smaller group of participants. Similar to other research that places the participant at the forefront of the experience or is otherwise participatory in nature, this research did not seek to achieve clinical outcomes. Our experiences can be enjoyed by anyone and are not made necessarily for people living with dementia: by designing with people living with dementia, we can move toward design approaches that are more inclusive and move toward technology that does not stigmatize. Likely, Janet’s enjoyment of the Shania Twain concert was not merely the use of the virtual reality technology; it was because we designed for her desires and choices. She wanted a Shania Twain concert, and that is what she experienced. In this context of research, we are designing for people—not focused on perceived cognitive deficits, but rather toward their present, ready to make use of a full spectrum of interactivity—including non-verbal communication and bodily movement.

5 Case Study Two: Media Capture of Meaningful Experiences

A key finding from our work above was that the environments provided a familiar experience that encouraged shared experiences with their loved ones. Motivated by previous findings, our next study explored the role of rich, personalized media experiences as a support for families living with dementia. Taking account of the ecology of care of the person living with dementia, which considers the person living with dementia, friends, and family, the experiences we created needed to be meaningful to the family—not just the person living with dementia. While prior work, including our own, have leveraged techniques such as reminiscence, we believe in some instances that this can limit the active participation of the person living with dementia in these design processes. While reminiscence can provide opportunities for engagement (Gowans et al. 2004; Yasuda et al. 2009), for some, it may merely be non-engaging or cause frustration when not being able to remember a specific memory from their past (Lazar et al. 2014). Another notable concern the first author had was lack of recognition and co-design from the first study. Researching under a culture of ethical ‘protectionism’ caused significant tension about formally acknowledging our participants as co-creators. While case study two was limited with anonymization of names for the research, there was flexibility to use the participant’s faces and images as captured in the study. With the families wanting their photos to be used and not to be blurred, we sought to recognize and acknowledge participants as individuals who have contributed to the research and to ensure that their knowledge, experiences, and time are shared.

In this case study, we carried out a Research Through Design (RTD) methodology. Our study aimed to explore the opportunities and challenges of designing personalized multimedia experiences with people living with dementia and their families. The previous research focused on the concept of reminiscence, with the researchers developing the environments after the workshops. In this second study, the experiences of being in the moment are most important, and we aimed for the families to capture and ‘design’ the experiences themselves using 360-degree cameras. We worked with three families: two married couples, both with a wife living with dementia, and where the husbands had formed a close relationship through attending a support group. Our third family was a family of four, where the father was living with dementia. Similar to the work above, we worked closely with Silverline Memories Dementia Café. The families took part in day trips, which they co-planned, with data collection duration during these days providing insights into their shared social experiences. Following this, workshops were also held to personalize the experience of media created during these days out. Finally, our themes focused on individuality, relationships, and accepted changed realities.

5.1 Designing in the Moment Experiences

Working with Silverline Memories Dementia Café allowed this study to develop in two key ways. First, the way we design research with people living with dementia. Traditionally, individuals living with dementia typically experience deficits in memory, language, and other abilities (Bartlett and O’Connor 2007). Due to this, traditional research methods such as interviews are not appropriate or useful ways to gain insights into people’s lives and experiences (Kontos and Naglie 2007; P. Kontos and Martin 2013). For this study, we were influenced by Silverline Memories, which prides itself on supporting its members (and families) with meaningful outings and day trips to engaging and stimulating locations. Our co-designed days out with the families was a way for us to bridge the gap in how we can engage in a more meaningful way through getting to know the history, personalities, and interests of each person in their ecology of care. Second, in working with the charity, we also followed their philosophy of living in the moment—‘[if] the present is all that person has, [then] that is their reality’.

5.2 Days Out

To begin conversations with families about participating in the project, we met families at one of the Silverline Memories days out. We used this as an opportunity to get to know the families, explain the research and purpose of it. For the families who were engaged in caretaking, we offered them a week to consider the type of location that held significance and value to them or a desirable destination for a future family outing. Four of our participants—The Fabulous Four—were John, Sarah, Lauren, Michael (see Fig. 15.3). Our first day out included both couples. The families had formed a close relationship over the last year from going to the same dementia-friendly community events. The two families decided on a National Trust Site north of Newcastle as this was a place that Michael and Lauren had become fond of over the past decade.

Fig. 15.3
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Anderson and Beckett family

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The family directed our day out to capture moments that they would like to experience again through personalized media. These moments would be captured using photography, audio-recordings, as well as more contemporary technologies such as 360-degree video cameras. On the day out, researchers spent time with the family as more than just observers. They would take part in activities set out by the families, engage in conversations and help with capturing specific moments the families wanted throughout the day. The day out captured insights into each family’s history, the families’ care for the person with dementia, and meaningful interactions between the family members (Fig. 15.4).

Fig. 15.4
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Collection of pictures from their day out

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Having captured a wide variety of content on the days out, we wanted to create ideas of how this content could be personalized and be used by the families. We invited families, designers, and dementia experts to individual family workshops to consolidate the personalization and to store the created moments from their days out. In the workshop, we shared pictures and VR videos to give each participant a perspective of the day out and to see the digital moments that the families had co-created. To structure this discussion of unfamiliar technological interactions, participants used a toolkit that consisted of cards and activities based on the interactions with the families before the workshop. The toolkit aimed to generate ideas and conceptualize technology interventions based on their past. Through our analysis of the data collected from the days out, and the workshops, we offer considerations that designers should consider when designing media experiences when working with people living dementia and their ecologies of care.

6 Future Directions for Designing Media Experiences

From this work, we offer two novel contributions: 1. a new model of practice for creating personalized media experiences for marginalized participants or those with special needs and 2. a series of future directions focusing on conflicting realities as dementia progresses, extended ecologies of personhood, and the aging body in immersive media. We will focus on contribution 2. for the remainder of this chapter.

6.1 Designing for Contested Realities

During our days out, it became apparent that the person living with dementia may slip in and out of realities which could then be contested by those around them, who may struggle with these conflicting accounts of reality. In particular, with one of the families we worked with, Michael would struggle to orient his wife, Lauren, to reality. Michael shared a story about how he struggled with always telling Lauren that her mother would not be coming over to see her, as she had passed away many years ago. Orienting the person living with dementia toward what we see as the right reality has minimal effect. The topic of lying or being deceptive is unsurprisingly controversial, but the use of therapeutic lying is somewhat questioned in what context it is being used (Casey et al. 2019; Elvish et al. 2010; Lorey 2019). Some researchers suggest that by lying, there becomes a sense of dishonesty, and once this occurs, trust is broken, which significantly moves away from person-centered approaches. While it is easy for researchers to engage in these types of moral debates, we are not usually the ones dealing with the challenging situations in care. Lying or the use of deception will continue to be a controversial topic, but when considering the use of deception, it comes entirely down to the situatedness of the moment. One must consider if the truth is the right or if it creates new grief for those involved. As researchers in the field, it is imperative to remember that a sense of self can come from more just an ability to recall and recount memories. Working with people living with dementia, we should reflect on what it means to design for this often-dreamlike state, depending on the stage of dementia. With this in mind, we should consider what it means to create media experiences for realities which may eclipse each other briefly rather than conflict with each other entirely (Hodge et al. 2019).

6.2 Every Person Has Personhood

In our second study, we aimed to design our media with not only the person living with dementia but to include their family members and friends. Traditionally studies often separate carers and people living with dementia as previous work expected different needs from one another. When carers are designed for/with, technologies typically have a focus on duties of care with direction toward assistive technology (Bennett et al. 2017; Bharucha et al. 2009; Gibson et al. 2015). Spending time with the ecology of care, and with a focus on memorable and pleasurable activities, the overall technology or activity tends to include a variety of interests and interactions that the ecology of care desire. With many carers reporting high levels of burnout and burden, targeting carers as research participants worthy of digital interventions focusing on personhood (as much as we target those with dementia) means treating them with respect, and as whole persons, rather than defining them by their roles (Hodge et al. 2019).

6.3 The Aging Body and Immersion

As mentioned in previous literature and in particular, Nolan et al. work on stigma, people living with dementia have reported a feeling of lack of confidence when going out. As we age, our cognitive abilities are likely to change, similar to Janet, who communicated bodily when experiencing the Shania Twain concert (Hodge et al. 2018). Researchers in dementia, such as Kontos (2018; Kontos and Naglie 2007; Kontos and Martin 2013) and Twigg (Twigg and Buse 2013), describe interactions of participants less from the perspective of verbal communication, but toward their embodied potential. For instance, people in nursing homes being able to choose to dress in certain ways, getting their hair done, exploring the use of dance to improve social inclusion. Creating opportunities for a variety of way of communicating one’s self, we start to consider how we may represent aging bodies in respectful ways which represent their personhood and individuality (Hodge et al. 2019). Engaging in this area of research, researchers must recognize the limitations of their way of communicating. We, therefore, must consider through co-design approaches, how participants may want to engage, and if this moves away from verbally, how can we design for communication through other means such as the body.

7 Conclusion

We have come a long way, and we have a long way to go. Over the past three years, our work has indicated tensions that arise in working within sensitive settings. As our work moved toward appreciating the importance of being in the moment in dementia care, it became apparent that the initial starting point of using virtual reality was not the critical part of the research. We have added guidance into designing media and VR experiences in this chapter. However, these future directions are guided toward designing for an individual, and not for a diagnosis for dementia. A collective contribution from the last 20 years of research around dementia is that someone living with dementia can still experience meaningful interactions, relationships, and activities at almost all stages of the condition (Kitwood 1998). But with over-protection, stigmatization, and emphasizing people’s lack of ability, many believe that people living with dementia are poor at social contact, which can then prohibit many from interacting with people living with dementia (Christine Bryden 2005; Riley et al. 2014). We all interact with the world differently. We communicate, experience, integrate ourselves differently from one another. Through relationships and learning from one another, we can move toward a more inclusive relationship and understanding of how our neighbors and communities can create meaning in their day-to-day experiences—regardless of their diagnosis.

Although as researchers in the field, we may understand that every person has personhood, this does not always seem apparent in the real world. Our next steps are to consider what it means to be an inclusive society, what it means to do inclusive research and to question the infrastructures that surround and often hold up our work. For instance, as researchers, how can we ensure ethical review boards are reflexive and dynamic when they are evaluating research that seeks to design in sensitive settings? Our two case studies stress that we should take a more empathetic approach to our work which is echoed by others working in the field (Foley et al. 2019a, b; Lazar et al. 2017a; Morrissey et al. 2016; Wallace et al. 2012b, 2013; Welsh et al. 2018). To build upon the consensus of designing with people living with dementia, as researchers, we should aim to consider how we engage with the community from the very start of the research. In terms of those working in dementia, we should be engaging with advocates outside of HCI, such as organizations similar to Dementia Enquirers (Dementia Enquirers—DEEP, s. d.). Working with organizations similar to this can help to ensure that research agendas are more closely aligned with the needs of the population, thus moving toward a more inclusive approach to design and society. Ensuring our research designs are rooted in participant-led agendas can contribute to ethically engaged research impact.

Finally, when we consider our impact, it is important to note that technology offers opportunities for meaningful engagement as well as create challenges relating to robustness and longevity when the project ends. Typical strategies to overcome these challenges could be to ensure a longer lifespan and technology support if anything goes wrong. Alternatively, we can aim for technology to become a part of a community and create meaningful relationships with our participant groups and research ecologies. This pertains to participatory and community-based research, personalization, recognition, and meaning. In this way, it is clear that technology alone does not hold any value; it is the relationships and experiences it creates and mediates.