Forthcoming Paper
Playing with Persona: Highlighting older adults’ lived experience with the digital media

Hjorth, L., Sheahan, J., Figueiredo, B., Martin, D., Aleti, T., Reid, M.,

Convergence

Exploring perceptions and practices of technology use and risk to understand how cultural probes like personas can offer us ways to connect playfully to lived experience to inform future imaginaries. In this paper, we focus on the six co-design workshops in which we deployed personas as representations of digital experience to challenge, explore, provoke and help build nuanced tools for implementation.Through personas, speculative fiction, and lived experience, we provide ways to rethink digital media in increasingly ageing futures.

Forthcoming Paper
Navigating Mediated Kinship & Care Ageing-in-Place

Sheahan, J.

Journal of Anthropology and Aging

Nearly three decades after Marilyn Strathern suggested the implications of innovation at birth, today, we are also grappling with technology's impact on later life. As assemblages of technologies have become essential to how and to whom we care, today, we also struggle with a future seemingly trapped by present choice as techno-determinist dogma appears to bind our society. Beyond imaginaries of robotically assisted and real-time monitored ageing, I examine how these new forms of kinship can serve us in realising “desirable” futures with the depth and aspirations so many have for ageing-in-place.

Conference Proceeding, 2024
Eliciting Network & Ecologies of Care in Later Life

Sheahan, J., Wilson, C., Pschetz, L., Dixon, B., Vines, J.

Design4Health Conference, Sheffield

While a large body of research has documented people’s experiences of care in later life, very little of this work has explored the complex networks and entanglements of care people experience in old age. This study draws inspiration from the expanding use of care concepts like ecologies and entanglements to unravel complex care relations, offering valuable insights for design considerations. Sent to 18 older adults across Scotland, the probe encouraged reflections on daily life, leading to revelations about care expectations, preparedness, and meaningful design possibilities within caringscapes.

Conference Proceeding, 2024
Technology caregiving: collectively re-imagining informal networks of care ︎

Sheahan, J.

AGENET Conference, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

In recognising the many ways in which care is configured and manifests, technology support in later life has become a common type of informal caregiving that remains misunderstood. While the rise of ‘senior-friendly’ technology has come with an ageing population, these often provide their own challenges to older people, seen to limit and infantilise them,yet with the genral growth of digital healthcare applications, caregiving as design support has become a key aspect of informal caring. In examining the experiences of technology caregiving amongst older adults across Scotland, we highlight the potential intergenerational and maintenance qualities that these emergent forms of informal care provide.

Paper, 2024
Journey Mapping Long COVID: Agency and Social Support for Long-Hauling ︎

Figueiredo, B., Sheahan, J., Zheng, Z., Luo, R., Bird, S., Itsiopoulos, C., Wan, D.W.L., Jessup, R., Xenos, S.

Social Science & Medicine

To understand the experiences of individuals with long COVID, or "long-haulers," we mapped individual journeys towards providing a framework for potential healthcare interventions by mapping personal patient journeys. The resulting dimensions of patient agency and social support highlight the importance of person-centred interventions considering patients' unique experiences and environments.