Dr Lois Peach, research fellow at University of Wollongong, visited CenSoF in September and held a workshop on digital play. Here she explores the debates around technology and children’s lives.

Children’s digital play is a complex topic requiring care. Recent discussions surrounding Australia’s social media age restrictions, for instance, have highlighted how decisions made by adults regarding children’s technology use – be it parents or politicians – can spark critical resistance as well as hope for alternative futures, including from children themselves.

Beneath these debates, however, is the all too familiar tendency to pit generations against one another in public discourse. It matters what children think and what they value.

Yet rather than reinforce difference between children and adults, now is a crucial time to consider what might be possible if we thought about children’s digital play across ages.

How much is too much?

Questions about whether, how, or how much digital technologies should be threaded through children’s play, learning and social relationships proliferate.

As any parent, educator, academic, or professional involved in children’s lives will know, discussion surrounding digital technology use requires carefully navigating paths through policy guidance, decision-making, and debate.

Research has shown that whilst parents implement screentime rules, they also employ flexibility, negotiating the situated rhythms of family life.

Similarly, a report launched earlier this year by the Raising the Nation Play Commission in England showed that children themselves understand opportunities and risks associated with digital technologies, particularly in relation to their right to play and participate in digital society.

A challenge for reconsidering children’s digital technology use in these nuanced ways, however, is we tend to think in binaries (e.g., digital/non-digital, real/virtual, good/bad, indoors/outdoors, home/school).

These binaries lead to assumptions about what should be valued in children’s lives (e.g., natural or digital play), who is valued (e.g., child or adult), and how (e.g., rights or protections).

Possibilities for learning and connection with digital technologies

I’m interested in how digital technologies can play a part in reconfiguring these binaries, and specifically, relations between children and adults.

In the research I’m involved in at the Children’s Technology Play Space (a living lab for the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child), the aim is to explore the transformative potential of digital technologies with children and the adults in their lives – parents, grandparents, carers, educators.

Through regular research activities, young children and adults engage in playful, pedagogic encounters with technologies, together.

Situated alongside the Early Start Discovery Space, a children’s museum at the University of Wollongong, the Children’s Technology Play Space is thoughtfully designed research space that aims to provide experiences which weave digital and non-digital aspects of play together and encourage inquiry, imagination, storytelling and social connection between children and adults.

Building upon research that demonstrates digital technologies can support children’s digital literacies in diverse ways, this dual research-translation space facilitates regular digital playgroups for families from the local community, providing a variety of activities that may be replicated or adapted at home or educational contexts.

The hope is to advance research exploring the possibilities digital technologies might afford for children’s learning and to support healthy, connected lives. At the heart of this space is a desire to explore children’s digital lives with children and their adults.

CenSoF workshop

Taking inspiration from the Children’s Technology Play Space, at a recent CenSoF workshop I asked academics to (re)imagine a space of digital play. The conversation and speculative making that ensued disrupted normative assumptions about both digital technology and who/what can be playful.

The CenSoF workshop brought together academics from across disciplines interested in how digital technologies are shaping children’s lives. We started by sharing memories and meanings of digital play before creatively cutting, ripping and reconfiguring cardboard boxes and magazine images to design a place of digital play.

What I noticed from the sharing of memories and collective making with boxes, magazines, and ideas about children’s pasts-presents-futures, was that it did not matter who the space nor play was ‘for’.

This environment was not designed exclusively for children. Instead, encouraging all to participate, a sign simply read ‘PLAY’. This acknowledgement of, and disruption to, the ways age matters reinforced our relationality as differently-aged humans whose lives are interwoven with technologies in diverse, joyful, un/equal and sometimes unseen ways. What emerged was a post-age place of play.

Playfulness across boundaries

Playfulness was also not exclusive to human bodies, nor lived ages. Like the plastic packaging that became synthetic ‘living lungs’ within watery worlds, our thinking together stretched boundaries between bodies and technologies.

Differences between the embodied experiences of each of the designed spaces – for instance between the mushroom room providing spongy slides, a space of slowness, and an immersive disco of lights, sound, and texture – were articulated in ways that showed their connection with each other. This also enabled us to notice and articulate how digital childhoods, continually and contingently implicated by social, political, economic and generational (in)justices, are different yet relationally connected. The reimagined space forged (in)visible lines of (dis)connectivity across people, spaces, times, and technologies.

Interestingly, our shared storytelling and speculative making reconfigured the ways digital technologies were, are, and might be part of childhoods – where childhoods are understood as still emerging with, not separate from, our (adult) digitally mediated and datafied bodies.

The workshop also highlighted how understandings about children’s lives and technology’s place in them carry capacities to become malleable, shifting across people, ages, generations, and times. There were no edges in play – digital/ nondigital, then/now, good/bad, adult/child – only differences holding together, connecting (in this case with lots of sticky tape!).

By thinking about children’s digital play across ages, possibilities emerge from relationships between differently-aged bodies, spaces and times. Rather than reinforcing separations, this opens up opportunities for asking broader questions about who and what is valued, about difference and (dis)connection, and – importantly – about how age can be made to matter differently.

Priscila Gonsales, Carolina Valladares Celis and Marisela Gutierrez Lopez attended UNESCO’s annual flagship event, Digital Learning Week, in Paris in September. Here they reflect on their learnings from hosting a Futures Workshop and the role of AI in education.

As part of the ongoing collaboration between the Centre for Sociodigital Futures and UNESCO, we had the opportunity to develop and run a Futures Workshop for the UNESCO Digital Learning Week in September 2025, under the theme “AI and the Future of Education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions”.

Futures Workshops are coordinated by the UNESCO’s Future of Education and Futures of Literacy and Foresight teams; aiming to foster long-term thinking about the future of education, encouraging critical reflection on a range of futures, and cultivate futures literacies. This year, the workshops were strategically scheduled over the last two days of the programme, so that the discussions were enriched by the events taking place throughout the week. And the inspiration was plentiful this year!

Keynote highlights

Just to highlight a few key excerpts from the keynotes: Emily M. Bender reminded us that we must fight against the discourse of AI’s inevitability, as teaching and learning are intrinsically social and relational activities; Bayo Akomolafe challenged the audience to stop seeing AI as a “tool” and instead as a “trickster” that forces us to playfully experiment and carefully reconsider our role in the world’s ecology.

Nina da Hora warned about empty discourses on ethics and design that ignore fundamental principles like dignity, as data isn’t the solution to everything in education. Last but not least, Abeba Birhane, gave a powerful talk inviting us to what could be called “politics of dreaming,” that is, how can we put into practice the collective exercise of designing futures in which communities have the agency to question preconceived narratives.

Futures Workshop

This was the cue for our workshop, titled “Global and Local Imaginaries: Speculating Sociodigital Futures in Education”, which drew on our research and practice at CenSoF, particularly the work of the Learning domain exploring participatory approaches to futures thinking, both in formal education and across the wider society.

In the first part of the session, Carolina presented an overview of the Learning Domain’s research, reviewing some of the ways in which the edtech industry’s narratives are shaping our perceptions of the future. As if there was only one future and education’s only responsibility was to adapt to it, and preferably as quickly as possible. This view challenges the old refrain, which perhaps surprisingly came up in one of the 2025 DLW Plenary panels, “AI won’t replace teachers, but it will replace teachers who don’t use AI.”

In the second activity, Marisela highlighted the work of the Collaboration Thread, situating schools as integral parts of local communities. She emphasized the importance of intergenerational dialogue to recover collective knowledge that can help build more just and plural sociodigital futures.

We also showcased Brazilian civil society actions and initiatives for digital sovereignty through education, such as the Observatório Educação Vigiada (Surveillance Education Observatory), Plantaformas, the G20 Brazil Policy Brief on Digital Public Goods in Education, and the Rede pela Soberania Digital (Network for Digital Sovereignty).

Dreams of education

In the final segment of the workshop, Priscila invited attendees to reflect on dreaming, that is, the act of imagining what they would like education to be like in a few years’ time. Central to this activity was acknowledging with participants that “dreaming” is not a naive or individual activity, on the contrary, it is a political and collective act.

The dreaming activity was facilitated using Cartas dos Talentos (Talent Cards), a social technology or ‘game’ created by Brazilian artist Ricardo Ferrer which engages participants in critical reflections on the individual and collective talents needed to positively change educational futures.

More than skills, abilities, or competencies, talents are related to our way of being and existing in the world. If we recall UNESCO’s four pillars of education, learning, doing, coexisting, and being, talents are present and integrated with each other.

Attendees were especially drawn to talents of living together, being, and having agency, which are not always present in technology-enabled education policies, particularly with the advent of AI technologies.

A critical perspective of AI in education

To conclude this blog, we would like to mention one of the stand-out session that took place towards the end of the event, which had a clear critical perspective on educational futures and AI. Professor Wayne Holmes’ panel titled “Critical Studies of AI in Education” provided insight into a forthcoming handbook that gathers 30 articles written by an international network of researchers on critical studies on AI in Education, including a chapter contributed by Priscila Gonsales.

During the 3-hour session we heard about some of the contributions to the handbook which provided a rich overview of the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches offered by the piece that challenges simplistic readings of “AI literacies”. Despite being one of the longest sessions, the audience remained attentive and interested, with most of them staying until the end of the panel!

The 2025 edition of the DLW, led by the brilliant Professor Shafika Isaacs and her team, made it clear that thinking about AI-mediated educational futures isn’t just about adopting tools. Above all, it is about values, attitudes, dignity, and social justice. The decisions made today, in the pedagogical, political, economic, and cultural spheres, serve as a roadmap for reimagining futures for education.

And, as the organizers emphasized, it is in collective action, between schools, governments, civil society, and researchers, that gives way to the possibility of transforming hopes and dreams into concrete practices that shape more just, inclusive, and critical societies.

UNESCO launched two new publications during the event:

AI and the Future of Education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions

AI and Education: protecting the rights of learners

Rebecca Coleman (CenSoF), Jessica Ringrose (UCL), Chiara Fehr (UCL) and Alessia Sofia (University of Bristol) discuss the topical issue of young people and smart phones following their research with over 600 children and parents, carers and teachers. Are bans the answer?

91% of young people in the UK begin using smartphones between 9-11 years old before starting secondary school (Ofcom 2022). However, there is much debate about whether and how they can do so safely, healthily and enjoyably.

Risks and dangers are amplified in contemporary public discourse. School bans and pledges to delay giving young people smartphone proliferate. Government policies aim to regulate minors’ smartphone use, and telecommunications companies strive to produce responsible guides.  

Our sociodigital futures research

In this rapidly developing context, we have been conducting research on young people’s and adults’ experiences of and future expectations of smartphones. This includes analysing the UK policy landscape and international movements advocating for bans or pledges. In partnership with Life Lessons, an organisation specialising in discussion-led PSHE education, we’ve conducted surveys with over 600 students, and carried out interviews with teachers and creative focus groups with young people in five schools. 

We have interviewed parents and, with Viv Kuh and Bec Gee, trialled creative futuring workshops, examining parents’ ideal digital futures. With Knowle West Media Centre, a Bristol arts centre and charity, we’ve explored young people’s smartphone use. 

Our research builds on sociodigital futures and postdigital work. These approaches see the social and digital as entangled and co-evolving, raising pressing questions about what and how futures are made, and by whom (Halford and Southerton 2024).

They question the possibilities of being offline, or non-digital, when everyday life (banking, homework, medical appointments, work, socialising) is increasingly digital (Evans and Ringrose 2025). We also draw on long-standing social science work showing that while smartphones pose risks, they also offer connection, safety and education (see Digital Futures for Children).  

Ban now, problems later?

From these perspectives, bans and age restrictions are rarely total: they may delay or displace problems and create new ones. For example, Australia’s forthcoming social media ban for under-16s will require everyone to authenticate their age, raising questions about feasibility, desirability and the growth of age-verification industries, which may have little to do with keeping children safe online (Third 2025).

Further, research on abstinence-based approaches to other potentially risky behaviours for young people (e.g. drinking, drugs, sex) shows such strategies can heighten harms and reduce help-seeking when problems arise (Phippen 2024).

To be clear, in arguing that bans and pledges are not simple solutions, we are not dismissing young people’s or parents’ concerns, nor their hopes for safer and more gratifying sociodigital futures. We are also not recommending students use phones during lessons. Rather we are suggesting that listening to diverse youths’ and families’ views about and hopes for tech is crucial.  

Four themes 

Our research has highlighted four core themes, which we suggest point to the need for enhanced media literacies around smartphones for parents/carers, young people and schools. 

First, our analysis of campaigns shows they rely on appeals to nature-based (i.e. technology free) childhoods, represented by images of largely white children surrounded by countryside. These lead us to ask whether some versions of childhood (white, middle-class, able-bodied) are dominating debate and therefore potentially neglecting a whole range of other experiences that must also be taken seriously.  

Second, interviews with parents and carers show they feel overwhelmed and unsupported when it comes to their children’s smartphone use. One mother said, ‘I’m not particularly tech savvy. […] when you’re a busy parent, making sure you’re on top of monitoring what they’re doing seems like quite a hard task’. Another said, ‘there’s just not enough guidance’. Such parental anxiety and uncertainty are echoed in Susannah Stern’s (2025) interviews with mothers in the US on signing the Wait Until 8th pledge. But delaying young people using smartphones (or social media) may not deal with the issues they might have, or doubts that parents might feel, but can defer them until later. 

Third, teachers are supportive of strict bans, seeing them as effectively reducing incidents in school. But this does not necessarily mean that the harms themselves have been reduced and responsibilities for them might be placed onto families who already feel ill-equipped. Teachers also identify major gaps in media literacy education, especially around social media and AI.  

Fourth, young people’s perspectives are rarely incorporated in policy and public debates and there are intergenerational divides. In our survey, 75% of young people opposed school phone bans, while most parents (88%) and teachers (87%) supported them. However, young people also worry about screen time and wanted parental guidance for online and offline activities. Banning phones in schools or delaying phone use may not address these issues. 

Avoiding digital inequality

In approaching smartphones as sociodigital devices, our research highlights how bans can neglect nuanced experiences of diverse young people and families and potentially increase digital inequalities and harms. It illustrates the value of qualitative, situated and participatory approaches to pinpoint relevant issues for diverse stakeholders and how these might be addressed.  

The House of Lords identifies an urgent need for critical thinking and analytical skills to access, evaluate, create and act on media, for both children and adults. We argue that the co-creation of responsive media literacies with a wide variety of youth and families is a vital next step. 

References 

Evans, A., and Ringrose, J. (2025) ‘More-than-human, more-than-digital: Postdigital intimacies as a theoretical framework’. Social Media + Society, 11(1). 

Halford, S. and Southerton, D. (2024) ‘Sociodigital Futures? An agenda for sociological research and practice’. Sociologia Italiana, 25 (3), 93-110. 

Phippen, A. (2024) ‘The Broken Online Safety Ecosystem’, Entertainment Law Review, 35(7): 233-239. 

Stern, S. R. (2025). ‘Wait Until 8th?: Mothers’ decision-making and management of children’s smartphones in the United States’. Journal of Children and Media, 1–19. 

Third, A. (2025) ‘On board the Australian social media “ban wagon”’, in Nelson, C., Buiten, D. and Death, J. (eds) The Public Child, Springer. 

Beckie Coleman and Susan Halford reflect on their trip to Naples in September to attend the RC33 conference.

One of the questions we are most often asked at CenSoF is, ‘how do you research sociodigital futures?’

Researching the ‘sociodigital’ is tricky! What methods can we deploy to explore how, where and when the social and the digital become so interwoven that they can no longer be fully disentangled? Taking this question seriously challenges the ontological, epistemological and ethical assumptions that underlie business as usual for research methods.

Conventionally, ‘technologies’ and ‘social life’ are treated as very different objects of inquiry, accessible through distinct methods, tied to different disciplines.

In fact, who can know about technology, on the one hand, or society, on the other – and how –  has long been embedded in an academic division of labour between engineering and the social sciences.

Social and digital entanglement

We now live in a world where the social and the digital are increasingly tightly entangled.

What then does that mean for the methods we need to investigate the sociodigital? Add ‘futures’ into the picture and it gets even more complicated.

Where better to dig into this question than at a research methods conference? With 500 delegates from all corners of Sociology? In September, in Naples?!

Way back in February it had been with some trepidation that CenSoF and our partners at the Southern Centre for Digital Transformation at Federico II, University of Naples proposed two sessions for the 11th International Sociological Association Conference on Social Science Methodology. We hoped that our agenda would strike a chord with the wider methods research community.

And, it did!

Record-breaking abstracts

Our session on ‘sociodigital methods’ convened by Biagio Aragona, Beckie Coleman and Susan Halford received more abstracts than any of the other 72 sessions across a varied conference programme.

Our questions clearly resonated, providing a shared space for researchers in different geographical and institutional settings to come together and grapple with shared concerns.

With limited space on the conference programme, we had to make hard choices about which papers to accept. In the end, we whittled it down to 12 excellent talks by speakers from Brazil, Italy, Sweden, the US and the UK.

These covered methods from autoethnography to topic modelling and named entity recognition, applied linguistics to speculative ethnography and experiments with Large Language Models.

They also brought together empirical fields of research from political mobilisation on social media to the use of predictive AI in child welfare (our own Debbie Watson), sociodigital work futures and commercial AI development.

It is hard to imagine these methods, topics and the ethical questions that they raise coming together at any other kind of conference! The shared focus on methods brought unlikely companions together and was hugely productive.

Pluralist methodology

Across and within the papers, a strong theme emerged about the importance of a pluralist methodology. That is, developing and mobilising different methods in conjunction – at the same time – to grasp the complexity of sociodigital phenomena.

We need to understand digital devices and data infrastructures together with everyday practices. This demands moving beyond social research methods and digital methods to the creation of sociodigital methods, which involves better known and barely known methods, from interviews, textual analysis and participatory approaches, to data analytics and computational techniques.

Alongside these sessions, CenSoF also ran a training session ‘Sociological engagements with Large Language Models’. Led by Jess Ogden (from Sociology ) and Les Carr (from Computer Science), this offered 25 conference participants a training session that alternated a critical introduction to the operations of LLMs with hands on experimentation.

Digital and data

Drawing in new computational techniques as a method for social research has been the subject of long standing debate in Sociology and Digital Methods.  CenSoF has a double take on this. First that digital, data and computational methods are important objects of inquiry for anyone interested in sociodigital futures.

What are these data, these operations, these infrastructures? And how are they embedded with social, political and economic relations? That is, how do we understand them as sociodigital?

Second, if and how might we use these data and techniques in our research, as ways of investigating sociodigital phenomena?

For example, how automated decision making shapes welfare decisions, or the consequences of next generation networks for digital inequality? What ethical and practical conundrums do they generate, and how should we address them?

The training session was an exemplary illustration of the approach that becomes possible at the inter (intra?!) section of disciplines; and just how essential this is for sociodigital futures research.

Overall, CenSoF x Naples was a hugely positive experience, culminating in a lively lunch with colleagues old and new at one of Naples’ many (wonderful) pizza restaurants. Our network has grown and will feed into a new edited collection ‘Sociodigital Futures Research Methods’. Watch this space!

Charisse Louw, South African researcher at Stellenbosch University, visited CenSoF over the summer and held a workshop exploring African cinema and embodied theory. In this guest blog she discusses the role of zombies as method. 

What if the zombie isn’t just a cinematic figure, but a method? A way of walking with the dead, tracing the residues of colonial extraction and racial capitalism in our digital infrastructures?

This was the animating thread behind my workshop and reading group on June 26th at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol. Titled Diffractive Methodologies for Sociodigital Futures, the session invited participants to feel their way through African cinema, embodied theory and black technopoetics. Here, the zombie became more than metaphor…it became method.

Why Zombies?

I hardly know. But they won’t leave me alone.

Zombies are archetypal figures that walk us into deep territory: histories, hauntings, systems of control, modes of resistance, and unexpected futures. They are ontological leaks, spectral labourers, glitching presences. In African cinematic imaginations, the zombie shifts from Western horror trope to ritual guide, mourning vessel, or encrypted body.

Zombies as methodology means reclaiming the undead not as collapse, but as refusal. It gestures toward unfinished liberation. It surfaces what dominant systems try to bury.

In the digital realm, zombies help us think about:

• Datafication of bodies and how the quantification of life creates a kind of digital zombification.
• Algorithmic control, where agency dissolves into systems that act without us.
• Digital hauntings in the persistence of one’s online past, spectral and sticky.

A zombie methodology invites us to move diffractively, through the interference patterns between memory, media, mineral and body.

Embodied Arrival

We began our time together not with slides or speech, but with somatic attunement. A Qi Gong sequence opened the body to relation, rhythm and breath. This was not a warm-up but a commitment: to be in inquiry with the body, not despite it.

We asked:

• Where does theory touch the body?
• How do digital media think with and through us?
• What kinds of world-making emerge when we attune to rhythm, breath and ancestral interference?

Drawing on bell hooks’s idea of theory as a site of healing, this was not scholarship-as-spectatorship, but scholarship-as-presence.

Diffractive Encounters with Film

Rather than analysing films for content or meaning, we used them as sensory fields for affective interference. Our film sequences included:

• I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), a gothic allegory of colonial haunting and Vodou cosmologies
• Atlantique (Mati Diop, 2019), a ghost love story of drowned migrants and haunted infrastructure
• Good Madam / Mlungu Wam (Jenna Cato Bass, 2021), a domestic horror unearthing spectral servitude and generational trauma
• Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025), an Afrofuturist vampire film where music opens portals across space-time

Participants were invited to respond not with interpretation, but with gesture, mapping, and shared reflection:

• What rhythms did the images activate in your breath or spine?
• Where did the image touch you?
• What did it awaken?

Reading Group: Fugitive Futures and Mineral Memories

Our afternoon session turned toward collective reading. Texts were approached as living archives, to be read aloud, rhythmically, and with breath. We engaged with:

• Ruha Benjamin on refusal as redirection and abolitionist imagination
• Neema Githere on Afropresentism and technology as ancestral portal
• Bayo Akomolafe on slowness as radical epistemology
• Katherine McKittrick on black methodologies as poetic refusal
• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on interactive archives and encrypted bodies
• Otobong Nkanga on mineral memory and the geologies of extractive grief

We asked:

• What future are you carrying in your body?
• What rhythms resist capture?
• What line haunts you still?

We read for texture, not mastery. For rhythm rather than argument and resistance over resolution.

Zombie as Diffractive Practice

To move like a zombie is to move through thresholds. Through syncopated time, spectral labour, and recursive presence. The zombie resists the linearity of technological progress narratives. It doesn’t march; it lurches, flickers, breaks rhythm.

As method, the zombie offers a deeply diffractive approach to sociodigital futures –

• It troubles boundaries between alive/dead, user/data, self/system
• It recodes media as haunted, not neutral
• It enacts a refusal of clean narratives, preferring mess, ambiguity, and entanglement

Zombies don’t walk in straight lines. Neither should we.

To CenSoF, thank you for the invitation and holding of this work. To all who brought their breath, questions and haunted traces to our gathering…this was not a workshop with answers, but a diffractive practice of feeling-with and I thank you for your courage and vulnerability.

Let us continue to ask not only what we know, but how we are moved.

Let the zombie walk with us…toward other rhythms, unfinished liberations and futures that glitch beautifully.

Thanks to the BSA New Materialisms Study Group, especially Prof Nick J Fox, the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group and CenSoF’s Debbie Watson, Charisse will be offering an online workshop on Monday 27 October . It’s free but requires online registration.

What comes to mind if someone asks you to draw some fruit? Or a fridge? Emma Atkins, PhD student at CenSoF researching fridge design and food waste, discusses insights from a recent food research workshop. 

In June, about 20 food geographers from around the country joined a two-day away day in Bristol. We visited a beautiful community garden and had workshops on how creative methods are used in food research, and I had the honour of organising the ice breaker. What came out of it was fascinating and made me reflect on where our food and food technology comes from – not just geographically, but historically as well.

I decided to organise a couple of rounds of ‘relay Pictionary’. It was like regular Pictionary – but a race between teams. We had four tables of around five people each, on which were some flipchart paper and marker pens. At the front of the room was a table with four piles of prompt cards, one for each table.

A participant from each table came up and picked up a prompt card, went back to their team and drew what was on the prompt card. When someone else on their team correctly guessed the prompt, another person on the team went to get the next prompt card from the front. This continued until the prompt cards ran out, at which point a team yelled ‘Pictionary’ and won the race.

The first round featured prompts all related to food items: bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables and so on. When the round was finished, I stuck the flip chart papers on the wall, so we could compare how each team drew the food items. I found it fascinating: everyone had drawn very similar images for each item of food.

Which fruit?

For fruit, every team drew an apple, and then most also drew a banana. Being in the UK, these are very common fruits people eat, and the teams had drawn them in almost identical ways.

Similarly, carrots were drawn for the prompt of ‘vegetables’ on every paper: another common food product in the UK, with a distinctive shape.

It was discussed that being in the UK for this exercise meant that certain food items were understood in a certain way: if we were in, say, South Asia or West Africa, would ‘vegetable’ look very different? How would people understand the prompt ‘fruit’ and what items would be the most simplest incarnation to draw?

We discussed how these are the kinds of food items people draw when under pressure, and when they want other people to understand exactly what they mean. Participants noted that they reached for the very simplest and most baseline images of food that they could think of, while also making them recognisable.

For example, it was observed that although there are many types of cheese, it is hard to differentiate between them easily, so the stereotypical ‘Swiss cheese’, triangular in shape and with holes in it, was used to make this drawing as clear as possible.

Cheese please

When asked about why this was *the* cheese stereotype, participants pondered about how cheeses in cartoons are drawn, in children’s books and on TV. That begs the question: how did this type of cheese become so prevalent in cartoons? Where do all these archetypal images come from, and at what point did they become the archetypes?

For the second round of Pictionary participants drew kitchen objects, including the fridge, the toaster, the microwave, and the hob. Again, participants drew very similar drawings for these objects.

One of the conceptual frameworks I am using for my PhD is called Science and Technology Studies (STS). It concerns itself with how science is ‘made’ and how technology comes to be. There are numerous examples of how certain objects and knowledges arose not simply because they were ‘the best’ but because of other compounding factors.

From icebox to fridge

A good example is the refrigerator. In her piece ‘How the refrigerator got its hum’ (1983), Ruth Cowan Schwartz details that the electric compression fridge ‘won’ against the gas absorption fridge not because the technology was necessarily superior, but because of the national rollout of domestic electricity networks by President Roosevelt, the size and influence of electric utility companies, and the aggressive marketing tactics of the electric fridge manufacturers. Without these factors, we may well have gas instead of electric fridges in our kitchens.

The drawings of the fridge made me reflect on this research: in another world, how would our fridges look different? The design of the fridge is indebted to the icebox, which was patented in the USA in 1838 (Gantz 2015). When manufacturers were creating the electric refrigerator, they didn’t want to stray too far from the familiar icebox design – they were already asking their consumers to give up a comfortable piece of technology for a relatively unknown entity.

Keeping the ‘box’ made the move to an electric fridge easier, even though it may not be the ‘best’ design for storing food. Studies (including my own) are showing that having deep shelves and drawers can make food more at risk of going off if it remains hidden from view and more easily forgotten.

Smart fridges

Some designs in the mid-20^th century attempted to move away from the traditional ‘box’ design, but they were not successful; and although food waste is now high on the agenda, fridge manufacturers seem to simply be heaping on more digital gadgets (like cameras and smart screens) onto the same boxy hardware. Will we move away from the ‘box’ one day? What would this Pictionary round look like in the future?

The Pictionary icebreaker was a great tool of bringing out the archetypes of food and food-related objects, and made participants consider why these archetypes exist. Other workshops that feature mundane objects and things, or STS-related themes, would benefit from this exercise. It was also rather playful and I hope it made everyone relax and feel more comfortable participating in the subsequent workshops.

References

Cowan, R. S., 1983. How the refrigerator got its hum. In: MacKenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (eds), 1985. The Social Shaping of Technology. pp. 202-218

Gantz, C., 2015. Refrigeration: A History. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company.

How do older adults and AgeTech industries imagine future ageing-technology? Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, researcher at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University who visited CenSof this summer, examines the debates around smart-home technology futures focused on trust, repair, and fall risks.

There’s a common narrative driving much of the technology designed “for” older people. Industry imagines an ageing population growing rapidly, accompanied by a shortage of caregivers.

In response, the industry predicts a future where older adults will be increasingly surrounded and cared for by smart systems, assistive robots, companion devices, surveillance tools, and AI-powered platforms designed to monitor and manage daily life.

This vision is often driven by urgency: ageing is framed as a demographic crisis that must be solved through technological innovation.

These assertions are based on my interviews with industry experts, drawing on comic scenarios, after a review of industry reports, and published here. But older adults don’t necessarily see their futures this way as my research with older adults in Melbourne demonstrate.

Both methods form the basis of my PhD based at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University (Australia) with Prof. Sarah Pink as lead supervisor.

In my household visits with older adults – drawing on video-tours and GenAI scenarios – I found rich, nuanced reflections that resist this binary framing of technology as either salvation or intrusion. Most older people I met do not simply accept or reject technology. Instead, their relationship to it is shaped by trust, repair, and anxieties. These are not binary positions – they exist on a spectrum, shaped by personal histories, imaginations, and priorities, and broader social concerns.

Trust in technologies

One recurring theme is trust. Older adults are not passive users waiting for technology to “assist” them. The idea of being constantly monitored or managed by machines, without choice or flexibility, raises serious questions about trust.

Many express concern over loss of agency, privacy, or being forced to adapt to systems they didn’t ask for. This relation to mistrust and trust is about feeling confidence, control, and security in their future.

Who will repair breakages?

Interestingly, participants also expressed fears about the possible breakage of technology,  that don’t usually appear in tech-centred companies, while enacting and showing me ways they would repair them.

Many questioned what happens when these technologies break down, asking who will maintain the technologies when they inevitably break? How will power outages or natural disasters impact the future smart home – without reliable backup systems – where older adults are envisaged to live independently?

These questions reveal a broader awareness of and concern around the fragility of technology – a recognition that the future is not just a place of progress, but also of vulnerability that we need to embrace.

Risk of falls

And then there is the question of the anxieties over the risk of future falls —an ever-present fear in later life. More than just a physical and metrified event followed by growing frailty as typically depicted through biomedical perspectives, it represents a turning point: the moment that can lead to institutionalisation, a move to a new home, or the loss of independence.

While technology companies monitor and quantify older people’s lives offering solutions such as sensors, alarms, or the removal of carpets and stairs to prevent risks, older adults are reluctant to instrumentalise fall risks since falls are an inevitable and pervasive hazard. They imagine fall risks as entangled with economic constraints, housing insecurity, cultural differences, and home objects and pets, often anticipating transitions with ambivalence or anxiety.

Design with care

My research investigates dominant industry and older adults’ visions, and urges us to take older adults’ imaginations seriously. They are not merely end-users or “beneficiaries” of innovation. They are experts in their own lives, actively imagining and shaping their own futures.

If we truly want to design inclusive futures for older adults, we must listen more closely and participate in the lives of older adults – not just to design a set of design requirements, but to how they resist and envision with hope the years to come.

As my PhD dissertation is expected to be submitted in January 2026, I hope to report back to my participants, strengthen collaborations with the AgeTech industry and researchers, and develop joint research around AgeTech futures with the ETLab, CenSoF, and more.