Conference Agenda

India is moving towards a health crisis, with a rapidly increasing population of older adults who have to deal with chronic health issues and declining family support. Remote health monitoring technologies offer opportunities for improved healthcare management; however, existing design guidelines often fail to address the cultural realities of Indian senior citizens. In this study, we identified six critical interaction areas for remote cardiac health monitoring, including self-monitoring, emergency response, and assistance-seeking patterns. Targeted cultural probes were designed for each area to evoke natural behaviours from 27 participants, aged 59-86, across diverse living situations. This participatory approach revealed that elderly dependency status was the most significant contextual factor in shaping digital health engagement. We also highlight the role of information presentation modalities and nature of medical equipment in shaping this engagement. These findings demonstrate how participatory methods can reveal culturally-specific barriers to health equity, challenging one-size-fits-all design approaches.

Living evidence refers to continual evidence synthesis and dynamic updating of clinical guidelines to support health decision makers with evidence that is up-to-date, reliable and trustworthy. The rapid take up of AI technologies and prevalence of unverified AI-generated medical advice create an urgent need to improve access to trusted, reliable evidence to support clinicians, policy makers and citizens with accurate health guidance. Developing a living evidence platform with South-East Asia and the Western Pacific - a region that includes almost half of the global population - requires a nuanced understanding of the diverse needs of clinicians, consumers, and policymakers across countries and contexts. Two co-design workshops engaged input from 10 countries, leveraging clinician and policymaker personas to understand experiences of accessing and using health evidence across settings. The process informed design principles for an AI-enabled regional living evidence architecture, and yielded learnings on inclusive regional co-design processes to envisage future technology solutions.

This paper develops the concept of "distributed care hubs" to describe the informal, relational infrastructures through which disabled people sustain everyday life amid insufficient formal care systems. Drawing on participatory research in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—combining community mapping, ethnographic interviews, and computational analysis—we show how community-built care emerges through ordinary social interactions, shared spaces, and reciprocal relationships. Distributed care hubs reveal that disability care and everyday sociality are inseparable; they challenge independence-centered policy frameworks by foregrounding interdependence as a universal human condition. Yet these hubs remain precarious, functioning as compensatory mechanisms shaped by systemic failures that force disabled people into informal survival arrangements. We outline policy implications that differentiate community-controlled care from responsibilities that must remain within formal systems, arguing for infrastructures that support integration rather than substitution. Ultimately, we demonstrate how community-generated care practices can guide more equitable, interdependent futures in disability policy and design.

Mass incarceration is a public health and architectural crisis in the United States. Extreme temperatures present mental and physical health challenges for incarcerated populations, exacerbated by the architectural strategies of carceral spaces. At the intersection of architecture and epidemiology we investigated how participants could leverage architectural drawings to analyze the inhumane temperatures they experienced in state prisons. Through interviews and focus groups with formerly incarcerated people, we found that the method of participatory architectural drawing allowed participants and researchers to spatialize the impact of extreme temperatures on mental and physical health as mediated by architectural space. Through a collaboration between public health, design, and sociology researchers we showcase how this method makes visible carceral experiences and builds reciprocity with researchers through the co-creation of architecture drawings. These findings are intended to support generation of policies and practices that mitigate mental and physical harm from extreme temperatures in carceral settings.

This paper explores the production and intended use of publicly available Geomatic Data Artefacts (such as geo-repositories, maps, and dashboards) and their relevance in the context of public health policies. We are an interdisciplinary team of academics with backgrounds in geomatics and design who began discussing the role of accessing and visualizing geographic data to support participation in public healthcare policy.

Specifically, this paper examines questions related to stakeholder involvement in the production and development of use scenarios for Geomatic Data Artefacts that inform public health policies. We reviewed existing artefacts, conducted a first round of conversations, and produced an introductory literature overview.

The aim of this paper is to spark a discussion on the human-centredness of such mapping endeavours, considering the potential of these designed artefacts to foster deeper engagement with healthcare service provision, planning, delivery, and assessment.

Café Séneca, the largest affinity chapter of the Uniandinos Alumni Association in Colombia, is dedicated to the wellbeing of older adults and led by retired members. Despite its popularity, the chapter lacked a strategic design structure, relying on inertia to shape its activities and limiting its ability to evolve sustainably. This paper presents a reflective case study of SenSilver, a situated participatory strategic design framework developed for organizations led by and for older adults. Combining business, positive, and empowerment-oriented design with biological, social, and psychological dimensions of aging, the framework was applied through a research-consultancy process with Café Séneca. The case revealed a dynamic of symbiotic behaviors, in which members continuously alternated between leadership and participant roles, shaping both organizational value and internal tensions while also countering the invisibilization of older adults’ contributions and agency in society. The study contributes a context-specific framework for strategic design in later-life organizations.