Abstract
With this paper we join others in their call to resist and challenge regimes of anticipations that suggest our futures are inevitably linked to certain imaginaries about data-driven systems. The future is not simply happening but is made now – through regimes of anticipation that shape our expectations, imaginaries, visions and hypes, and define what is thinkable and desirable. Who or what is able to claim the future is an exercise of power and a matter of social justice. However, current anticipations circulating about datafied futures are often determined by powerful social actors such as states or technology companies. In this paper, we explore how we might open up futures-making to different people in relation to futures of ageing. Central is the question of whether and how we can actually think (and imagine) outside of powerful anticipation regimes around the increasing spread and relevance of data-driven systems and/or ageist assumptions about how to ‘fix’ the problem of demographic ageing. We draw on data from a series of design fiction workshops with older adults, civil society organisations and civil servants in Germany, Austria and the UK. Our analysis explores how participatory futuring might allow participants to question their own assumptions and anticipations about the futures of data-driven technologies in ageing societies but that, due to ‘discursive closure’, this may not lead to radically different futures imaginaries.
Introduction
With this paper, we join others in their call to ‘resist’ artificial intelligence (AI) (McQuillan, 2022) and challenge the ‘uncontroversial thingness’ (Suchman, 2023), ‘inevitability’ (Bareis and Katzenbach, 2022) and harmful techno-solutionist framing of data-driven technologies (Crooks et al., 2024). Our approach is based on the understanding that datafied futures are not simply happening but are made now – through ‘anticipatory regimes’ (Adams et al., 2009) that are steered largely by market-defined actors, such as government, funders and technology companies. These actors construct, materialise and disseminate ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (e.g. Jasanoff, 2015; Mager and Katzenbach, 2021; McNeil et al., 2016) that shape everyday anticipations and define what is thinkable and desirable.
Anticipatory regimes determine and ‘prestructure which developments are considered relevant and urgent, possible or inevitable’ (Konrad and Böhle, 2019: 102) through expressing a particular way of ‘thinking and living toward the future’ in the present (Adams et al., 2009). They lead to what Annette Markham (2021) has described as ‘discursive closure’. That is, that certain practices or technological designs are made to seem like processes that just exist or are inevitable. Neutralised in this way datafied futures are imagined as ‘value-free routines or routine ways of thinking’ (p.392), which risks removing both a sense of agency and also recognition of where sociotechnical anticipations originated and what values and norms they represent. This reinforces both a sense of the inevitability of certain uses of technologies and a sense of powerlessness as she suggests, people seem to have difficulty imagining futures in ways that do not reproduce current ideological trends or cede control and power to external, mostly corporate, stakeholders. The power of anticipatory logics and ‘trajectorism’ flowing through everyday discourse around technologies builds and reinforces a hegemonic ideology of external power and control. (Markham, 2021: 384)
This focus is relevant to critical data studies for several reasons: First, regimes of anticipations around demographic ageing are tightly interwoven with claims about the increasing burden of an ageing population on social and health care services in the Global North. In this anticipatory regime, older people have become a key demographic labelled as ‘risky subjects’ that can and need to be managed by data-driven technologies (Shimoni, 2018). However, in contrast to younger generations, they are often overlooked as having a stake in datafied futures. Second, most work around anticipatory or futuring methods has focussed on younger people, who are invoked as ‘the future’ and often assumed to be more ‘responsive’ to and ‘empowered’ through speculative approaches, particularly in relation to sociotechnical futures (Coleman, 2017; Facer, 2015). This further marginalises the lived experiences and agency of older people in an increasingly datafied world. Third, we are living at a time where what it means to be human, and a sense of our own longevity, is being redefined, through the development of biosciences and genomics (Braidotti, 2022). Environmentally we are experiencing a climate crisis and new epidemics which – in the Global North – affect older populations, in particular minoritised older adults, more strongly. In a context of increasing social and structural injustices (also within this age group) questions of digital exclusion and access to technologies as we age are also a concern. These times, and the disciplinary anticipatory regimes that shape our experiences in the present, therefore lead to a growing sense of the uncertainties, complexities and ambiguities related to our own and others’ ageing futures. A range of affective responses and fears related to ageing result from the anticipatory regimes described above: anxieties around the kinds of care that might be available as we age; a sense of isolation from others as digital connection replaces physical connection and fears of not being able to afford to age healthily (Cozza et al., 2019).
Anticipatory regimes of ageing are deeply interlinked and co-constituted by anticipatory regimes around data-driven technologies. Together they create a discourse that gains ground in the everyday lives of older adults: an increasing responsibilisation of older adults to care for their own health, resulting in increasing surveillance regimes over the lives and bodies of older people, and an emerging economy of data-driven health applications (e.g. Dalmer et al., 2022; Gallistl et al., 2024). In the context of these anticipations there is also an ‘absence of (alternative) expectations of the future’ which is ‘equally impactful on the present’ (Prainsack, 2022: 13). If data-driven technologies and ageing are solely imagined within a neoliberal model of capitalism that perpetuates ageist assumptions about the lives of older people, then this is highly problematic. It is the absence of specific imaginations of the future that people deem desirable that explains why, despite being fully aware of political and economic practices and arrangements that are detrimental for human and planetary health, we have not changed these arrangements. (Prainsack, 2022: 13)
The paper is structured as follows: First, we review how anticipations about ageing futures and data-driven futures intersect and co-constitute each other. We then provide an overview of the literature on anticipation studies and regimes of anticipation. We subsequently discuss our methodological approach which draws on participatory futuring methods. We present some of our empirical findings from futures workshops with older adults, policy makers, community organisers and healthcare practitioners in three European cities. The paper closes with a discussion and reflection on what we might learn from our experiments in order to challenge anticipatory regimes and think ‘otherwise’ about preferable technofutures of ageing.
Anticipations at the intersection of ageing and data-driven technologies
As we age, we are continually asked to anticipate and plan for our well (ill)-being, financial and social situation (Adams et al., 2009; Shimoni, 2018). This line of ‘discursive closure’ is further manifested through present imaginaries of data-driven systems such as ambient-assisted living (AAL), smart home devices and smart health applications which are used for activities recognition, control of vital status, position tracking, interaction and communication, multimedia amongst others (Calvaresi et al., 2017). Such ‘gerontechnologies’ (Gallistl et al., 2023) are usually described as ‘seamless, unobtrusive and non-invasive’ as they operate ‘via an invisible user interface’ (Dunne et al., 2022: 14) and are presented as a ‘cost-effective way to enhance independence, security and health’ (Dalmer et al., 2022: 77–78). Hence, they are promised to promote healthy lifestyles, ‘independent living’ and ‘ageing in place’, to support caregivers and ensure safety, whilst preventing social isolation, all key policy goals internationally. In all of these discourses data-driven systems are imagined as solutions to the economic and social ‘problems’ of population ageing (Cozza et al., 2019; Joyce, 2021).
These imaginaries and resulting anticipations of technofutures of ageing align with a number of concerns raised in critical data studies. First, data-driven systems allow for new forms and possibilities of surveillance and control. Their invisibility and pervasiveness pose important challenges in relation to privacy, identity, security and trust for those whose lives are regulated by such technologies (Friedewald et al., 2007). One of the reasons for the invasiveness of these technologies (and their lack of regard for privacy) is their original application in public spaces, workplaces or prisons (Berridge and Grigorovich, 2022). For example, systems for fall detection in care homes stem from use cases in prisons to detect and circumvent suicide. Adding to this problem is the fact that AAL technologies are highly reductionist and invisibilise much of the heterogeneity and complexity of everyday lives. For example, while surveillance technologies may be able to detect aggressive behaviour that is associated with progressing dementia, they disregard ‘structural influences of aggression (e.g. overcrowding, boredom, low provider-to-resident ratios, limited provider autonomy and heavy workloads), which cannot be measured or addressed using surveillance technology or automated algorithmic decision-making’ (Berridge and Grigorovich, 2022). Hence, data-driven technologies normalise new forms and possibilities of surveillance and control while at the same time reducing care arrangements to those things that can be surveilled and quantified.
Second, data-driven systems have an impact on people's practices, self-perception and knowing about their bodies (e.g. Lupton, 2013). Data-driven gerontechnologies are claimed to cater for the needs of older adults by promoting independence, autonomy and safety. However, they also draw on assumptions that imagine ageing bodies predominantly as ‘risky’ and in need of care (Shimoni, 2018). ‘Techno-ableism’ (Shew, 2020) is a powerful discursive figure that relies on the assumption that we need to ‘overcome’ unruly ageing bodies and disability through a technical fix. The ways in which such technologies ‘are designed and implemented are a product of how we envision the ‘proper’ functioning of bodies and minds’ (p.1). In this context, technical self-care through data management is a form of labour one performs both for personal worth and as an enactment of responsible aging citizenship. (Dalmer et al. 2022: 83)
Third, data-driven systems work within co-constituted manifestations of power relating to gender, class, race, age, sexuality and disability, and their intersections which systematically exclude and dehumanise particular people (Manchester and Willatt, 2024). Ageing populations are extremely heterogeneous and huge differences exist amongst older adults with respect to how structural inequalities throughout their life affect their health, well-being and access to technologies in the present. For example, while well-educated middle and upper-class older men tend to be proficient users of digital technologies, older women from low-income or migrant communities are the least likely (anticipated) users (Cozza et al., 2019). Data-driven technologies themselves may also exclude certain social groups. For example, Christina Harrington et al. (2022) explored health information seeking with 30 US Black older adults in lower-income environments to understand how they ask health-related questions to Google Home, a voice assistant that is trained on conversational data of dominant social groups. The study uncovered how the participants had to perform ‘cultural code-switching’ in order to engage with voice assistants and mitigate communication break-downs due to their way of speaking. Hence, data-driven systems can perpetuate heteronormative ideas around ageing and foster existing structural inequalities across different groups of older adults.
Discourses of what ‘healthy’ or active ageing looks and feels like – from videos of octogenarian athletes to horror stories of living in care homes – add to a sense of anxiety of the futures associated with our ageing bodies and lives. Fears circulate where technologies are seen as ‘fixes’ for unruly bodies, or as replacing humans in caring roles, and there are growing concerns over unequal access to longevity or immortality through these techno-fixes (e.g. Cozza et al., 2019). These fears create anticipatory regimes that act in the present to perpetuate certain ideas, behaviours and stories about ageing and datafied futures. Hence, we argue that regimes of anticipation around datafied futures pervade the way we think about ageing futures (and vice versa), based on imaginaries that are lived and felt as inevitable in the present (Adams et al., 2009; Coleman, 2017). We now turn to a review of key concepts around anticipation and futures-in-the-making that will inform our further analysis.
Regimes of anticipation and futures-in-the-making
Futures studies is not new but has often focussed on gathering data to support prediction, forecasting or foresight work. Foresight work explores trends, often focussed on abstract possibilities, independent from any context, aiming to suggest multiple possibilities (Poli, 2015). For instance, looking at graphs and other data that demonstrates how populations are ageing and the possible effects, divorced from specific locations and lived experiences. This leads to prediction of economic demands such as the ever increasing ‘burden’ of a demographically ageing population and the likely social and political effects of this, for instance on intergenerational relations. In an era of datafication, algorithmic systems perpetuate this denial of uncertainty as they claim a sense of definiteness, a promised capacity to make unknown futures known (Amoore and Raley, 2017; Hong, 2022; Jarke et al., 2024). These forms of prediction and their visualisations tend to eliminate complexity and provide persuasive narratives about how the future will unfold.
Anticipation studies challenges this sense of certainty and stability in relation to futures by starting from the premise of the need to develop ‘an active and critically reflective interaction with futures that are unknowable’ (Amsler and Facer, 2017: 1). It starts from a belief that, not only can we not know the future, but that futures are multiple, complex and uncertain (Miller, 2018) and therefore could be ‘otherwise’. So, whilst the future does not really exist in the present, anticipation certainly does.
Regimes of anticipation emerge around particular collectively shared ways of thinking, reasoning and imagining futures that are made to seem inevitable or highly likely. They become articulated and materialised through anticipatory practices that affect the design of policies (e.g. legislation such as the European Union AI Act (EU AI Act) or World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines of age friendly cities), infrastructures, the allocation of resources, or transform practices of professional societies as well as individuals. Regimes of anticipation feed from collectively shared ‘technoscientific imaginaries’ (McNeil et al., 2016) or ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009) which bind anticipations of futures of social life and social order with advances in science and technology. Affect is an important driver for the formation and stabilisation of regimes of anticipation which often operate through fear as we increasingly anticipate ‘crises’, particularly in relation to population ageing (Tutton, 2023). Ultimately, these sociotechnical imaginaries feed into our anticipatory practices in the present.
However, multiple imaginaries currently co-exist and are contested around futures of data-driven technologies, and generative artificial intelligence more specifically (see, e.g. Hogan, 2024; Widder and Hicks, 2024). They are highly commodified by specific corporate actors in whose interest it is to promote particular ways of anticipating (demographic) ageing (or any type of social) futures alongside data-driven technologies. It is hence not surprising how anticipatory regimes around data-driven technologies inform and intersect with disciplinary anticipatory regimes concerning older adults’ lifeworlds.
The fact that regimes of anticipation are always multiple and contested, but also that they operate through affect, leaves room for response and/or resistance (McQuillan, 2022) potentially providing participatory futures work with an entry point for critique and re-imagination. A key question therefore becomes how to disrupt current disciplinary anticipatory practices and support people to develop new ones that connect with ideas of the future as open, unknown and unpredictable in order to critically engage with the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of our datafied present (Miller, 2018; Poli, 2017).
Methodology
Starting from the premise that the future is uncertain, unpredictable and unknown we brought together older adults, policy makers, community organisers and healthcare practitioners. We wanted to work to connect viewpoints, practices and approaches in order to critique and disrupt current anticipatory regimes (Zamenpoulos and Alexiou, 2020) through mutual learning, imagining and making together. We entered into this experiment with trepidation taking the challenge, as set out by Markham concerning discursive closure, seriously in seeking out methods to open up these possibilities. We also wanted to recognise the roles played by affect and embodiment in closing down capacities for ‘thinking otherwise’ in relation to ageing and datafied futures, staying attuned to the relationalities, and affective forces at work in imagining otherwise (Lupton and Watson, 2022).
We created a space for diverse publics to come together to question and support others to explore, the promise of algorithmic systems and ‘stuck’ techno-fix or techno-apocalyptic imaginaries. We invited policy makers, community leaders, older adults and healthcare practitioners to come together in workshops in which we asked them to re-connect with datafied futures of ageing as situated in ongoing and complex unfolding everyday experiences and regimes of power. Our aim was to work to build contact zones for rethinking our relations with datafied and algorithmic futures, for challenging accepted imaginaries of ageing well with technologies. We wanted to redefine ideas of who is understood to be an expert in the making of datafied futures of ageing and better understand who has control over what is thinkable and desirable.
In what follows we first outline the methodological approaches and methods that we drew on in designing our methods, we then present points of reflection that result from the insights gained during our work.
Participatory futuring methods
The field of participatory futuring is growing and comprises a range of diverse approaches that can help unblock imaginaries, decision making and action (Ramos et al., 2019). In recent years futurists and designers have collaborated to come up with tools and methods to support anticipatory practices in the present. As a result a growing number of speculative methods for participatory futuring have emerged. Several terms have been associated with these endeavours including: speculative design, design fiction and experiential design (Candy and Dunagan, 2017; Dunne and Raby, 2013). These new fields seek to problematise futures and open up possibilities for imagining preferred futures, often through making (Meskus and Tikka, 2022). They use techniques that support people to engage affectively and in an embodied way with anticipatory practices with an aim of working beyond the abstractions often written into futures thinking. For instance, experiential design as a field sets out to viscerally engage people, enabling them to ‘experience’ futures in the present. Design fiction, meanwhile, emerged from fields of design and speculative storytelling and it seeks to make futures tangible, through the creation of physical objects, installation or media texts. As such the term overlaps with speculative design which uses ‘what if’ scenarios, ambiguity and provocation to create artefacts that generate debates on sociotechnical futures (Dunne and Raby, 2013; Malpass, 2016).
Each of the methods and tools designed in these fields come with their own ‘structures of participation’ regarding the focus of the imagination (e.g. a thing, a relation, a process, a person), its framing (e.g. what kinds of futures are evoked) and the ways in which it allows participants to engage with each other (e.g. the mechanism of the game). Practices of participatory futuring ‘do not simply describe realities but also tend to enact these into being’ (Law, 2009: 239, italics in original). The methods adopted therefore ‘assemble and arrange the world in specific social and material patterns’ (Law and Ruppert, 2013: 230). In this article we therefore want to focus in on the performative effects of the participatory futures methods we adopted, how, ‘particular age constructs are enacted through these practices but also how – and for whom – certain issues are made relevant, thinkable, perceptible and actionable’ (Lopez-Gómez and Criado, 2021: 87).
Methods: Datafied ageing futures-in-the-making
Recognising the invisibility of data and algorithms in our everyday lives, and the intangibility of ‘futures’ we were searching for a method that helped to make datafied futures more ‘specific, tangible and meaningful’ (Kimbell, 2019: 131) and to support groups to engage affectively to build evocative new stories around datafied futures (Goode, 2018). We recognised the power in arts-based methods as having a potential capacity to go beyond normative assumptions and discourses (Coleman, 2017), enabling imaginative connection with possible datafied futures of ageing through drawing on embodied and sensory experiences.
In our workshops we used a card game called ‘The Thing From the Future’. The game has been described by its originators (Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson) as a ‘design fiction game’ (Candy and Dunagan, 2017). The creators state it is: a foresight tool and imagination exercise in the form of a deck of cards. Part scenario generator, part design method, and part party game it invites players to collaborate and compete in describing, telling stories about, and sketching or physically prototyping artefacts that could exist in alternative futures.
We chose to use this game for several reasons. Firstly, we felt the approach would support participants to render tangible immaterial dimensions of datafied futures. In addition, the game uses a ‘mood’ prompt card (e.g. optimism, despair) that adds an emotional element to the game, something often missing in futures thinking (Candy, 2018). The playful approach was also appealing to us as we felt that the prompts helped in making complex ideas more simple through drawing boundaries around the imaginative process to support creativity (Candy and Dunagan, 2017).
We hoped that by enacting these methods we might be able to move people towards anticipating alternative datafied futures of ageing that might recognise the ambivalences and injustices written into current regimes of anticipation. We hoped that the methods would also help bridge between abstract notions of datafied ageing futures and felt and embodied experiences of everyday lives in the present. In this way we wanted to encourage groups to come back to and critique today. Through this we hoped to highlight ways we might loosen the sociotechnical imaginaries and therefore the enactments of anticipatory regimes around ageing described in the paper so far including those related to surveillance, privacy and control; ‘truth claims’ made about older adults’ bodies and lives through data; and forms of data resistance.
We ran three workshops, each lasting three hours. One workshop took place in Bristol in the UK, one in Bremen in Germany, and one in Graz in Austria. We invited mixed groups to the workshops, including policy makers, age charities, community and voluntary sector workers and older adults. Each of the workshops introduced a social, political or economic context identified as of interest to the participants invited. Between each of the workshops we reflected on the previous ones and adapted the methods, both for the context but also following reflections together on how the methods worked in practice.
In all workshops, participants were given a very short introduction around ‘futures’ thinking, and the potential importance of imagination. Participants were encouraged to treat the activity as a chance to temporarily leave behind the pressure of their roles and everyday lives in order to dream of alternative possible ageing technofutures. This was related to our awareness that participants had busy professional lives where they were often asked to respond or react quickly to immediate issues and that they had few opportunities to imagine differently.
Participants were asked to work in groups, they were dealt four cards – an arc card that specifies the type of future world the object comes from, an object card that describes the type of object it is, a terrain card that defines the context and a mood card that suggests an emotional reaction that it might spark in an observer from the present (Figure 1, Situation Lab). For the first workshop in Bristol, we redesigned the cards with a focus on a matter of concern for people interested in ageing and technologies with a broad theme around imagining technological and social futures for age just cities. We adapted the World Health Organisation Age Friendly City framework (WHO, 2007) as a basis from which to re-write the ‘terrain’ cards, including the terrains: civic participation, communication and information, community support, health services, housing, learning, migration, mobility/transport, outdoor spaces and buildings, social inclusion/respect, social participation, work and employment.
Thing from the future card types.
Each player first imagined their own response to the four cards by describing or drawing an object that ‘fits’ the dealt cards. These ideas were then each discussed in the group. We took seriously the anticipatory regimes circulating around ageing and the concerns Markham raises around possible ‘discursive closure’. We therefore gave participants an opportunity to try out the game several times before they decided together as a group which of the ideas or things, or which amalgamation of their ideas, they wanted to develop in a second activity. Once they had chosen a ‘thing’ we asked the groups to work collectively to develop their idea further. This involved asking them to build characters and tell stories about how the thing would work in the new future world imagined.
We then introduced a version of the futures wheel activity (Figure 2) to ask them to consider how ‘the thing’ might fit into sociotechnical assemblages – environmentally, economically, culturally, technologically, educationally, politically, psychologically and in terms of welfare structures. The aim of this was to re-engage with the present and consider the possible unintended consequences written into their speculative designs. The future wheel connects with concerns and concepts developed in critical data studies that point to the socio-political and socio-economic embeddedness as well as locality and situatedness of data-driven systems (Hepp et al., 2022; Loukissas, 2019). For example, Kitchin and Lauriault (2014) proposed the term ‘data assemblages’ to encompass ‘technological, political, social and economic apparatuses and elements that constitutes and frames the generation, circulation and deployment of data’ (p.1). Jo Bates et al. (2016) introduced ‘data journeys’ to examine the socio-cultural values, power dynamics, political and organisational contexts, as well as material conditions in which data circulate and are attributed meaning and value. The futures wheel activity hence encouraged participants to critically examine the wider implications and entanglements of their speculative objects.
The futures wheel (Glenn 2009).
Each group was encouraged to present their object, using visuals or stories and explaining how it might be situated in a particular sociotechnical assemblage in a plenary. Comments, questions and discussion was encouraged.
Design fiction futures workshops
It is beyond the scope of this article to report on every ‘thing’ that was designed in our workshops. Not all of these ‘things’ related to datafied or algorithmic futures, although many of them did. Here we choose some examples that support us to understand the questions of how we might develop anticipatory practices in relation to datafied ageing futures.
Bristol workshop
We started in Bristol where our invitation was to an existing community of practice interested in ‘Age Friendly Cities’. The community of practice included practitioners, older adults, policy makers and community organisers interested in building and imagining future cities that were designed with ageing populations in mind. The workshop took place in a large room at the University of Bristol on the fourth floor with a view across the city (Figure 3). Around 20 people attended. The intention here was to build on the university's reputation as a convening space for reflection and imagining differently. However, we also acknowledge that power hierarchies associated with university settings may have made it more difficult for some people to attend, or for those present to feel comfortable enough to imagine and reflect. In order to locate the work in a present-day policy and social context the workshop began with a short presentation and discussion from an age charity in relation to the city's plans for an age-friendly city. This presentation followed the WHO Age Friendly City metrics which tend to stress practical solutions and issues related to health in making the city a better place for older people whilst also pointing out the importance of recognition and representation in relation to older adults in the city.
The participants then worked in groups to try out the Thing from the Future game. We asked people to self-organise into groups where they were not working with people they knew well or worked with every day. In what follows we outline an example ‘thing’ that was designed that connects with the ideas presented in this paper around datafied futures.
The example comes from a group who received these four cards (Figure 4). Their design was a Health/Body Scanner that people receive from birth. The scanner has data about the family health history which it was felt would lead to more preventative health care across the lifecourse. The device was seen to support a move towards an age friendly city by enabling greater prediction of (inevitable) health concerns to enable us to live longer and more healthy lives, perpetuating current anticipatory regimes around ageing. It focussed on data collection devices that would enable the prediction of health concerns and positioned older adults as taking up social and economic resources. As the participants came up with the idea, they were excited about the potential of this device as they felt it would lead to less need for doctor's appointments and reframe health provision as being related to prevention rather than cure. It was also imagined that economic savings could be made as the device decreases the need for local doctors, We were talking about it being linked to your doctor's surgery or hospital and it kind of comes up with an alert and kind of cuts out of all the exploratory, screening and consultations that you might have to catch things sooner. And it would download info and maybe have your family history.
Workshop room in Bristol.
Cards dealt to the Health/Body Scanner group.
Bremen workshop
The workshop in Bremen adapted the approach of the Bristol workshop held three weeks earlier. The materials were translated into German and specific adaptations of terms were made. For example, we added terrain cards to include themes beyond age friendly city metrics, such as recreation and leisure, sustainability, education. We also adapted the introduction with a more specific focus on digital and social futures for citizen-centred and participatory cities. The workshop was aimed at civil servants from the fields of urban development, neighbourhood management and municipal administration as well as older adults. Ultimately, five people took part in the workshop, making it considerably smaller than the Bristol one. The workshop took place in a meeting room of a neighbourhood centre. It began with an introduction to current policies in urban planning in relation to ageing and smart city technologies by two civil servants.
Similar to Bristol, participants first worked individually and then in groups with the ‘Thing from the Future’ card game and then proceeded with a reflective discussion based on the Futures Wheel activity. The example we draw on in this paper comes from a group that was dealt the following cards: Arc – Disciplinary Society in a hundred years; Terrain – Learning; Object – a Job Advertisement; Mood – Alienation. Based on these cards, the group developed a prototype for a computer chip that is ‘implanted’ into the bodies of citizens who do not (or no longer) have the cognitive abilities required to participate in society. A ‘digital test’ is used to decide who is implanted with the chip and when. This would ‘allow’ people to receive support when using public services, but decisions can also be taken away from them by the software, so that free decision-making options are restricted and the citizen receives a Digital Legal Guardian. This Digital Legal Guardian also monitors their health and, for example, reminds them to take their medication. Social participation would also be controlled in this way, for example by monitoring social interaction and recognising tendencies towards loneliness.
This Thing from the Future clearly spoke to regimes of anticipations around increasing datafied surveillance and control. The sense of fear and crises works to set up the ageing body as a risky subject against which we must all insure and the creation of a life-long moral imperative to anticipate our own financial, health and social well-being in later life. Here we see it is not only the imaginaries and assumptions around the inevitability of certain kinds of technologies and their development that influence our visions and imaginaries, but also those associated with deficit understandings of ageing and ageing bodies as being economically problematic and as requiring continual repair. Technologies are seen to offer the promise of more autonomy and social connection over our lives enabling us to live longer, independently and well at home and age in place. In addition, the focus on loneliness responds to concerns that attribute social isolation to be a key predictor of low health and well-being in old age. However, it is important to note that participants were aware of the highly problematic nature of framing older adults in this way from the very beginning. Their reason for choosing to explore possible futures further in which a Digital Legal Guardian was important, was partly based on their curiosity about how much further regimes of control and surveillance could go and what kinds of agency might be granted to older adults in these futures.
Graz workshop
The Graz workshop took place in the town hall and was promoted through the senior citizen office in the municipality. The participants included six older adults, three civil servants and two community organisers who formed self-selected groups around three tables. A member of the senior citizen office welcomed participants. We, as workshop facilitators, gave a brief introduction to the aims of the workshop, but also, and this was different to our earlier workshops, encouraged participants to reconsider what technical innovation may be (Figure 5). To do this, we tried to challenge some common (mis)conceptions of technology through presenting some of the first human innovations: the hand wedge vs the basket. Following feminist thinkers, we then encouraged participants to think about technical innovation not just in terms of domination, efficiency and competition (e.g. the wedge) but also in terms of care and community (e.g. the basket) (Fisher, 1979; Le Guin, 1989). We also encouraged participants to think about technical innovation not simply as neutral tools but rather as socio-politically and socio-culturally embedded (e.g. how bicycles were appropriated by feminists in the late 19th century, e.g. Jungnickel, 2015).
Slide from workshop introduction in Graz asking 'What is technical innovation?'.
In the workshop, one group designed a Sunshine Room which becomes more interesting and beautiful the more diverse the people in the room are. The group started with the following prompts: Arc – Growth a few hundred years; Terrain – Social Justice; Mood – Respect; Object – Toy, and initially designed a ‘Sun Swing’ in a room or as a holographic visualisations. People were envisaged as entering a room and everyone being able to get on a swing. The atmosphere was imagined to be one to increase well-being and community. After further working on the idea through the Futures Wheel, participants adapted their design, imagining a giant glass bowl. The more people there are, all of different ages, so not just selectively young, middle-aged, older, but all mixed together, the more beautiful it becomes in this room. For example, you can climb the Eiffel Tower or see the butterflies, birds, the Northern lights, whatever you like. It stimulates your cognition, it's an exchange of experiences. For all generations, this counteracts loneliness. We [also] thought it's important to be able to affordably explore and visit other places, countries, the world, the seven wonders of the world.
In relation to dominant regimes of anticipation, the Sunshine Swing suggests that technology could release older adults from the confines of space and time solving some of the ‘problems’ associated with the economic and environmental costs of ageing populations. As in social imaginaries of ‘active ageing’ older adults themselves are made ‘responsible’ for their own well-being. It is perhaps not surprising that Virtual Reality (VR) was imagined to support users’ well-being as such technologies play an increasing role in providing ‘good care’ for older adults and facilitating their social participation. They are also promoted as medical devices that stimulate brain functions for older adults with ‘mild cognitive impairments’ (e.g. Liao et al., 2019). The sunshine swing also considered older adults’ financial resources and the possible effects of life course structural inequalities on health and well-being.
Participatory futuring, datafied futures and regimes of anticipation
Our experiments demonstrated that participatory futuring is not performed in a vacuum but is embedded in regimes of anticipations which are fuelled by powerful sociotechnical imaginaries that create certain future pathways and foreclose others. Therefore, they frame what is thinkable or even seems desirable (in line with Markham's concept of ‘discursive closure’).
Through our experiments we recognise that participatory futuring methods act in different ways to engage publics in certain types of anticipatory practices. We therefore also recognise the importance of understanding the assemblages we created through the choice of publics and practices utilised in the different workshops. We found that the different framings through the initial presentations in the workshops were important in supporting connections with the everyday lives and work of those attending the workshops. For instance, in Bristol the ongoing Age Friendly City work, in Bremen urban planning and in Graz a more explicit focus on ageing and datafied futures. This meant that those attending felt able to bring their expertise, knowledge and concerns to the workshop. In Bristol the age friendly city framing made certain things visible in thinking about ageing futures, in particular the WHO metrics being more focussed on health and well-being than a rights-based approach. In Bremen there was a focus on participatory urban planning as a collective anticipatory practice. And in Graz a more general struggle to determine how and which diverse groups of people may have a say in determining the future was prominent.
We also found that the social, political and economic realities of the different countries played a part in the designs and stories imagined. For instance, austerity regimes in the UK were prevalent in many of the group's imaginaries, in particular in relation to the disintegration of the National Health Services. In Bremen the focus was very much on the transformation of the city with many (planned) constructions (e.g. a car free inner city). In Graz, questions around social cohesion and social participation were more prominent also due to the political climate and increasing living costs.
Where and when participatory futuring happens is therefore important in how it might highlight particular regimes of anticipation in relation to ageing in datafied worlds. This includes questions around the kinds of data that are collected to represent older adults’ lives and processes of ageing (e.g. behavioural data, socio-economic data, biomedical data) and the kinds of data that are ignored, the extent to which these data redefine how ageing is understood (e.g. risks, care needs, resources, (dis)abilities) and what becomes invisible or newly visible.
As can be seen from the designs generated in the workshops, we found participants were willing to engage in the game and that it enabled a playful approach that promoted imagination and supported groups to render datafied futures of ageing more tangible. Participants were able to use the ‘things’ they designed to create evocative stories and construct future worlds. However, we also found that often several ‘warm up’ rounds were required to support people to get into a more imaginative and affective space. When asked what they had found difficult in the workshop one participant said, ‘Letting go of existing parameters and being really imaginative and creative. Really enjoyable challenge though’. This was different for different participants and led to some frustrations, as reported by one participant after the event, ‘I found it hard not to say something to the person who kept saying look I’m a realist! It brought out my small child who wanted to say, ‘Well this is about imagination’.
The prompt cards were helpful in supporting groups to create a ‘thing’ that was visible and tangible, unlike the datafied systems that work in older adults’ lives now that are often invisible or invisibilised. The fact that the prompts created some boundaries around this imaginative process enabled all groups to come up with an idea that then allowed them to critically reflect on the present and likely datafied futures if we continue with a ‘business as usual’ approach. The differences between the prompts, for instance whether they were positive or negative moods or transformative or disciplinary arcs, sometimes, but not always, led to either utopic or dystopic future designs. The Digital Legal Guardian example, with a disciplinary arc and alienation as the mood card, enabled the group to deliberately explore a dystopic datafied future and to consider what needed to be done in the present to avoid this. However, the Health/Body Scanner group, who were dealt the well-being mood card at first, felt they were creating a preferable future. It was only through critical reflection using the Futures Wheel activity that this group began to realise the ambivalences and unintended consequences of their design, despite the mood card they had been dealt.
Overall, we found that it was productive when we took the participants further away from the gamified or imaginative mode, by asking them to consider how their future thing might be situated in certain environmental, economic, cultural, educational, political, psychological and technological contexts. Through this activity participants began to think about the possible unintended consequences of their designs and/or the assumptions about demographic ageing and old age that are built into many contemporary data-driven gerontechnologies. As facilitators committed to questioning these anticipatory regimes, we intervened to support groups to consider critical questions around data privacy, data practices in the everyday and the redistribution of agency across networks in relation to their designs. This focus on situating the ‘thing’ as embedded, sitting within socio-political and socio-cultural assemblages (Bates et al., 2016; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014) enabled some participants to question their own anticipatory assumptions around datafied futures of ageing.
We also saw reasons to believe that this kind of method can lead to thinking otherwise around ageing technofutures. However, it is important to note that these examples do not engage with datafied futures of ageing but rather focus on technologies that support connectedness, agency and empathy. For instance, in Bristol, an evocative story of increased freedom and connectedness was told through a future transport system design which gently recognised diversity, enabling all, whatever their age, to access the resources of the city, including nature and green spaces. In Bremen an intergenerational and multicultural housing complex or a compulsory school subject called ‘old age’ in Graz suggest a more connected, collective experience of ageing in a future world that foregrounds empathy instead of sympathy for older adults and connection across generations. For example, through the school subject, children learn about the lived experiences of older people and that ‘they themselves will age and be the older adults of tomorrow’.
Reflecting after the event many participants said they had found the game freed them from the limitations they experience in the present. For instance, one participant in Bristol said they appreciated, ‘the chance to plan new ways of doing things, freed from the usual restrictions we place on ourselves of something ‘not being affordable’ or ‘being unrealistic’. This led to some interesting conversations and ideas that could be applied to real problems. Another, in Graz, stated that ‘It's somehow good to get out of the daily grind and reflect on it a bit. And also, to hear how other people understand it and what they think, how they think, so very helpful’. A civil servant at the Bristol workshop commented on how the game made him understand his own work differently, as ‘being connected [referring to the use of the Futures Wheel] and having an impact on the future’ and an urban planner in Bremen seemed to suddenly understand their work was connected to futures-making and that therefore they had some responsibilities towards anticipating otherwise: I’ve been thinking about the future in the office but I’m not so aware of it. Because when you’re in your everyday life, somehow in your tasks, they have nothing to do with anything like that. But actually, the task we have as urban planners is totally important. And we shape the future and have a responsibility. I found it so exciting with this diversity from our fields of interest or work, how the ideas developed from this. What I experience again and again is that there is such a separation. There's a department here and there's a department there. And all this networking, that's such a big thing for a city to think about.
In a next iteration of our workshops, we see different options to experiment. One is to further deconstruct the ways in which (anticipations of) ageing futures and data-driven futures intersect and co-constitute each other. This can be done by specifically mapping (marginalised) subjectivities of ageing that shape the design of the ‘thing’ or result from it. It would focus more strongly on anticipatory practices at the intersection of ageing and data-driven technologies. Another way is to focus on the ‘socio-cultural interiors’ (Von Stackelberg and McDowell, 2015) of utopian or dystopian futures more strongly. This could be done by using storyworlds which feature the shared meaning and concerns of groups as expressed in their culture, collective structures, language, worldviews, values, institutions and also practices, connections and relations. Science fiction could be starting point for participatory futuring as it ‘trains people to be aware that there are other ways to do things and other ways to be. That there is not just one civilisation, and it is good and it is the way we have to be’ (Le Guin in Curry, 2018). And even though most science fiction is deeply rooted and entangled in present concerns, it potentially challenges dominant discourses and anticipations and ignite alternative regimes of anticipation.
Conclusion
With our work, we join others in challenging powerful regimes of anticipation around data-driven technologies and in particular AI. We recognise, like others, that these anticipatory regimes create ‘discursive closure’ (Markham, 2021) around what people consider possible, desirable and thinkable. Hence, our experiment with participatory futuring has highlighted that methods are not performed in a vacuum but are embedded in regimes of anticipations which are fuelled by powerful sociotechnical imaginaries that create certain future pathways and foreclose others. While Dan McQuillan (2022) has asked us to ‘resist’ AI, we want to ask how people might imagine alternative and/or preferred datafied futures. Doing this with older adults, practitioners and community organisers is particularly important as they are usually disregarded in conversations about futures. However, we recognise that, for these re-imagined futures to have any impact in the present, we might also need to work with those who hold power and currently perpetuate ageist approaches to technology designs and innovation for older adults, including technology developers and policy makers.
In this paper we have only described one method of participatory futuring and we recognise that all methods act in different ways, in diverse settings and with different participants. It is therefore important to understand the assemblages we are creating through the choice of methods, publics and practices we are bringing together in these workshops. However, we believe our evidence suggests the value in bringing diverse publics together to consider datafied futures of ageing otherwise through imaginative, affective methods based on ‘life as it is apprehended, felt, embedded and embodied in the present’ (Candy and Dunagan, 2017: 137). We found this approach enabled participants to consider their own anticipatory understandings and practices and, in some case, to critically reflect on them and consider what needs to be done in the present.
Some of our participants reflected on the importance of listening to people who do not usually have a say in futures making in order to build agency. They remarked, How can you really make people heard who are frustrated because they feel they are not being heard? Well, what I experience from the very small scale, my small professional field, is that people are also frustrated because they have the feeling that they are not effective. Experiencing a feeling of agency is the only way to motivate people to show themselves or get involved.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following academic institutions for their support for our research: International Research Development and the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol, Institute for Information Management – ifib at University of Bremen, the International Relations Office and the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz. We also acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz for the open access costs. In addition, we would like to thank AgeUK Bristol, Landesamt GeoInformation Bremen, City Administration Bremen, Senior Citizen Association Graz. We thank our co-facilitators Stefan Welling, Michael Viertel, Sara Skardelly as well as all the participants of the workshops. For constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper, we thank our fellow members of the Socio-Gerontechnology Network and the Aging in Data project as well as participants of our lecture at the Institute for Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the participants and convenors of the EASST/4S 2024 panel on Futures Work. Finally, we would also like to thank our three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of an earlier version of the manuscript, their constructive reviews and helpful suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Universität Bremen, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, University of Bristol.
