Fear, Feedback, Familiarity… How are These Connected? – Can familiarity as a design concept applied to digital feedback reduce fear?

Abstract

This paper is a reflective paper discussing fear, and the emotions associated with it, felt by the elderly while using modern technologies. The pattern of fear emerged from our initial research activities. The preliminary results presented here are part of the pre-study phase within the Multimodal Elderly Care Systems (MECS) project, which focuses on the design of a safety alarm robot for the elderly. Here, we explored various design issues that elderly encounter in their daily interaction with various modern technologies. One of the explored issues is digital feedback, the subject of this paper. The aim of our exploration was to look at what potential design implications that digital feedback may have on the elderly’s interactions with these technologies, such as triggering the feeling of fear when using them, and what we could learn from those when designing a robot safety alarm. Finally, we propose familiarity as a central design concept for designing feedback.