Choosing Together: How Dyadic Negotiation Shapes Adaptive Kitchen Design Preferences for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment and Their Care Partners
Adaptive technology for older adults with cognitive impairment is typically designed around individual preference, yet most of this population lives and cooks with a spouse or family member. This paper examines a co-design workshop in which four dyads and two individuals (N=10) built kitchen cabinet designs from twenty-one options across five features. Thematic analysis of thirty selections identifies recurring patterns: visual access retained through enclosure rather than open shelving, physical effort treated as a household concern, and automation accepted when predictable. Structured analysis of ten interaction episodes shows how some patterns were negotiated in practice, including care partners contributing embodied constraints distinct from the primary participant, and disagreements resolving through documented deliberation. Together, the two analyses show that adaptive technology preferences are not always individual properties but can be shaped through household interaction. We offer candidate design implications for facilitation protocols and collaborative systems supporting shared decision-making in aging-in-place contexts.
Advance directives preserve autonomy, but they involve abstract, challenging choices. Existing decision support for advance directives structures decisions rather than facilitating the articulation of preferences. This limitation points to large language model–based conversational agents (CAs) as a potential alternativ...
Ruben Albers, Marc Hassenzahl· Proceedings of the 14th Nord...· 0 citations
Domestic robots are increasingly imagined as long-term inhabitants of the home, yet most current design framings still assume a single intended user. Real households, however, are shared by multiple co-residents whose routines, values, and expectations are simultaneous but not always aligned. We report a card-based co-...
Ling-Yun Chen, Eli Blevis· Adjunct Proceedings of the 1...· 0 citations
Autobiographical remembering supports identity, well-being, and social connection in later life, yet voice-based memory technologies largely rely on isolated prompts. We designed and built MeBo, a fully functional relational voice-based memory companion, through participatory design with 11 older adults. Their accounts...
Hasibur Rahman, Mahsa Nasri, M. Vaidya et al.· 0 citations
LLMs are becoming part of everyday life, including for older adults (OAs). OAs often learn digital technologies with younger family members, who have traditionally served as"warm experts"providing trusted and personalized operational help. LLMs expand this role: family supporters may also help OAs judge appropriate use...
Hyehyun Chu, Yuri Lee, Y. Park et al.· 0 citations
Conversational agents increasingly interact with children, yet evidence on how their design shapes children's susceptibility to persuasion comes almost entirely from the lab. We report a $2\times2$ randomized field experiment embedded in a public German Santa Claus telephone hotline. Children's calls were randomly rout...
Thilo Tamme, David Steck, Anton Hantel Technical University of Munich et al.· 0 citations
Understanding children's social behavior requires methods that capture interaction as a dynamic process rather than a set of isolated acts. This study illustrates how the dynamic interaction pattern (DIP) approach, based on the Transition Matrix Technique, can be used to model such processes in dyadic interaction....
Elizabeth T. Hallers-Haalboom, P. Lodder, Marieke G. M. Vorstenbosch-Hamers et al.· Social development (Oxford....· 0 citations
AI agents can generate code at a scale that’s hard for humans to review line-by-line. PDD Kit helps ensure the code is doing what the developer intended by creating formal specifications and testing against them. It converts developer intent into a Verus specification, proves AI-generated code meets it for every input, and uses tests where proofs aren't practical. Developers review intent, not every line. The post Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit appeared first o…
Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 23, 2026
During the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences’ 75th Anniversary Symposium, President Sally Kornbluth said “MIT has never needed your particular insight and guidance more than we do now.”
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