Knowledge-making on ‘ageing in a smart city’ as socio-material power dynamics of participatory action research

Introduction

During the last two decades, the city of Oulu in northern Finland has promoted itself as a smart city where novel ubiquitous computing infrastructure serves all city dwellers in their everyday tasks. New computing technology is deployed in downtown in the form of interactive displays and open-access network, for example. In our anthropological studies, we have previously investigated how the design of smart Oulu has, for the most part, neglected the participatory design approaches. Instead, the identification of potential new services has mainly been based on the spatial, temporal and numeral usage of the services the designers have innovated (Suopajärvi, Ylipulli & Kinnunen, 2012; Suopajärvi, 2015). As a member of the multidisciplinary research group that focuses on studying and designing the smart city, I wanted to examine how the design could start from the everyday practices and the future hopes of the citizens. I have concentrated on senior citizens because they are often considered being in the margins of the digital society.

My study scrutinizes the design process as negotiations of knowledge-making on ageing and participatory practices. Consequently, I have brought together people representing different stakeholders connected with the design of public services targeted for senior city dwellers. Seniors aged 64–89; city officials working in service design, urban planning and information services; as well as, social scientists, computer and information processing scientists and architects, have collaborated in four workshops based on the methodology of participatory action research (PAR).

Participation, civic engagement and community empowerment are all very topical issues, both in public administration and academic world. In Finland, new legislation concerning the social and health services of the ageing population that became valid in 2013 emphasizes the involvement of ageing adults when deciding on the services they need (Laki, 2012/980). Locally, in the new service model of the city of Oulu, the aim is ‘to get citizens of all ages to participate in and influence on the design and decision-making processes concerning their own living environments and services’. Further, in renewing the service model for senior citizens, its ‘success requires the consideration of the opinions and needs of the aged, both in wellbeing services, dwelling, sports, education and urban planning, as well as in developing the public transportation’ (Oulun palvelumalli, 2013, 2020, pp. 22, 28; the author has translated the original Finnish texts). This change to the former model based mainly on ‘formal knowledge’ calls, however, careful critical studies. Public participation may form new hegemonic paradigm that hides the existing power relations (Kesby, 2005); obliges everyone to become involved in the name of dutiful citizen (Ziegler and Scharf, 2013); decreases the value of participation in private spheres, like care and nurture (Minkler and Hostein, 2008); and only appears transformative but in reality, does not benefit the citizens (Yoshihama and Carr, 2002).

Following these critical reflexive notions on the civic engagement and participation, I focus in this article first, on scrutinizing how we came to know the meanings of ageing and the aged as citizens of Oulu through our workshop collaboration (Pålshaugen, 2004). Second, I discuss how the practices of knowing ‘come into being’ in socio-material intra-actions. This onto-epistemological perspective introduced by feminist techno-science scholars, like Karen Barad (2007), underlines the inseparability of human, non-human, discursive and material ‘components’ of the phenomenon. These components thus intra-act inside the phenomenon they constitute, instead of interacting which refers more to separate entities that come together to exchange information, for example (Suchman, 2007). Third, I consider what feminist new materialism brings into the understanding on the (participatory) action research process?

Methodology: Knowing as becoming

The methodology of PAR focuses on practices on two levels: the aim is to guide the participants of the process to carefully consider their own everyday practices and whether they should be changed. On the other hand, the participants should collaboratively reflect the practices constructed in the PAR process itself (Yoshihama and Carr, 2002). In PAR, practice is understood both as individual and social; it is ‘constituted and reconstituted in human and social action that projects a living past through the lived present into a future’ (Kemmis and McTaggert, 2005, pp. 574). Practice is thus considered as multiple temporal, social, semiotic, and, in the case of my study, also material entanglements.

Another essential starting point of PAR is that it aims for radical social change. This process starts by identifying the problems and problematic practices collaboratively by all participants. Then, participants make a plan to change these practices; which is next enacted and observed. Finally, the whole process is reflected by everyone. This ‘spiral’ repeats its form until the set goal is reached. (Kemmis and McTaggert, 2005.) In our PAR project we did not get to the phase of implementing our ideas due to the timescale of my research project but also due to the many processes that were simultaneously going on in the city. The emphasis was from the beginning to start from the needs of the seniors based on their everyday practices and to identify the problems to be worked on together (Genat, 2009; Yoshihama and Carr, 2002).

I read our PAR workshops with the perspective of various socio-material entanglements represented by feminist techno-science scholars Donna Haraway, Lucy Suchman and Barad. I consider the practices of knowing that are constituted in the workshops; and how these practices, and simultaneously mattering components, ‘come into being’ in multiple intra-actions. I follow especially the notions of Barad who argues that ‘practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world’ (2007, pp. 90). Knowing is thus an unfixed and continuous performance that comes into being in the intra-actions of all agents. All participants are accountable for the enacted practices; and as researchers we must be particularly sensitive about the worlds we make through our studies (Haraway, 1991). Thus, focusing on the knowledge-making practices of the collaborative workshops means also considering the power relations constituted in and through them (Greenwood and Levin, 1998).

Another important aspect of feminist socio-material perspective is to look at all practices – discursive, embodied and non-human – as boundary-making projects. Barad writes (2003, pp. 815) that through intra-acting the ‘boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and (…) particular embodied concepts become meaningful’. Boundaries are not still but they are in a continuous flux, they are slippery and complicated (Haraway, 1991). It is significant shift to understand that the boundaries are enacted within the phenomenon, like the phenomenon of ‘aging in the smart city’, and that for example researcher is looking the phenomenon from the ‘inside’, (s)he is inseparable from other agents. This means that research questions, materials and findings become re-produced over and over again in the intra-actions of the entanglements of human and non-human agents (Barad, 2007). Through this perspective I aim to understand how ageing becomes constituted in our intra-actions, and which human and non-human components turn out to be significant, while others will not.

Though in this article I concentrate on our workshop process, I recognize that the boundaries and meanings are constituted before, while, in-between and after the workshops (Cahill, 2007; Pink, 2009). As an anthropologist I rely on ethnography as my core methodology when I analyse the PAR as a process where different boundaries become renegotiated and defined. However, it must be noted that compared to the ‘traditional’ ethnographies, my study represents the kind of ethnography that in addition to ethnographic descriptions from ‘the field’ is more directly engaged in striving for change (Beck and Maida, 2013). The methodological assemblage of my study is composed both to enable me to answer my research questions and to complement each other. PAR is used to construct and frame the socio-material practices of the workshops; feminist new materialism works as an onto-epistemological perspective which affects the reflexive ethnographic reading and thus analysing of our workshop process. This means that PAR methodology is in fact an influential agent in our practices of knowing; and the ethnographic analysis tries to consider the meanings of non-human agents in this process as much as possible.

Identifying the problems, finding solutions

In the invitation to the first workshop at the end of October 2013, I wrote that the meaning of the workshop series was to bring together senior citizens, city officials and researchers to discuss what kind of place Oulu is for its ageing city dwellers. In the first workshop, I explained that these were also the aims of my research project, but in addition, I was looking for good participatory practices in designing urban places and public technologies. I underscored that the main methods in the workshops were co-generative learning through discussions in an open atmosphere; and that everyone in this process was considered as an expert (Beck and Maida, 2013). Consequently, the aims of our workshops were first, to identify those current practices which needed to be reformed in the relationship between the city and senior citizens; and second, to find better practices. We were also going to discuss how senior citizens could participate in public design processes; so, the third, implicit, aim was the empowerment of the seniors as citizens.

In the first workshop called ‘Utopia: Oulu in 2030’, I asked the participants to imagine together in small groups, what an ideal city would be like for the ageing citizens without thinking about real-world restrictions. While planning the workshop, I felt the need to give the groups some guidelines, so I told them they could discuss themes like dwelling, services, mobility and hobbies, in addition to open-ended themes. These guidelines were taken very seriously and most groups went strictly through all of them. In the first and last workshop, the workgroups were formed as ‘non-mixed’ (Ataöv, 2007; Pålshaugen, 2004). This means that the seniors formed their own groups, and the city officials and researchers were either in their own groups or formed one group together. In the second workshop, these small groups were mixed, and in the third workshop, the whole group worked together throughout the meeting. At the end of the workshops, each group presented the summary of their discussions to the others, and we discussed them together. In our first meeting, the two main challenges for the seniors as the citizens of Oulu were identified as the lack of (cross-generational) sense of community and the lack of communication between the city and its citizens.

The second workshop ‘From utopia to ideas’ took place two months after the first one. I sent everyone a week in advance a summary of the first workshop, and suggestion of the themes we would continue to work on though leaving room for other topics, too. After the discussion as a whole group, the work continued in three small workgroups. The task was to tackle the problems identified in the first workshop, and the groups came up with brilliant but still quite realistic ideas. One that combined both problems was organizing computer courses at schools where the pupils could teach seniors as part of their school curriculum. This would include public transportation services for those elderly who would need it. Ideas to enhance sense of cross-generational community were, for example, that seniors could eat at school canteens; public community centres could arrange events for adolescents, or seniors could visit places for teenagers. Overall, mutual respect and dismantling segregated life spheres were seen as the keys to strengthen the sense of community.

To improve communication between the city and citizens, the groups suggested using different kinds of media, like paper magazines and the Internet linked to each other. This way, seniors could get the basic information from the ‘traditional’ media that they preferred to use; and extra information or forums for discussions could be on the Internet (see Kanayama, 2003). One group came up with the idea of Oulu’s own TV channel where people could watch, for example, live streaming from the city council meetings, and have commentators explaining what was planned or decided. The seniors were excited about new magazine ‘Ouluseni’ (‘My Oulu’) that was targeted for +65-year-old citizens and were keen on developing it. So, we decided to invite someone from its editorial staff to our following workshop to discuss our ideas. Consequently, the main theme for the third workshop was decided to be information and access to it.

The third workshop took place in February 2014. In the beginning, a city official gave a presentation on the services that the city of Oulu offers to its elderly residents. The following conversations took place in one big group, and circled around the questions of how seniors could better find the information they need, and how citizens could better be informed about local governmental plans and decisions. The city officials assured that client-centred and participatory design was important for the city, and that its significance was growing. The city architect however admitted that they had problems in informing the city dwellers and having them participating. The senior participants claimed that this information was missing, or the participatory events were too ‘fancy’.

In this workshop we learned that the magazine ‘Ouluseni’ would not be published in the future, instead all city magazines were compressed into one. This was bad news for the seniors who used newspapers as their primary source for local information. Nevertheless, in our fourth workshop in October 2014, the seniors were still quite optimistic that their suggestions and ideas would be eventually implemented. In addition, we discussed how seniors could be more involved in the planning processes. Three workgroups came up with a similar idea that the methods we had used in our workshops could be adopted in community centres around the city. Especially the seniors thought it was important to have a permanent organizer, people from the city as participants and to discuss both larger and more focused topical issues. The city officials thought that the workshop methods would be more productive if the focus was on much smaller issues and on very practical level. Some of them, however, said that through our workshops they had learned to understand the value of open interaction.

Ageing as a state of modesty and being looked after

In our first workshop, ageing in the city of Oulu was mostly discussed through the discourse of looking after oneself or being looked after. This practice was linked to the health care services that are available for seniors who live at home but whose health situations vary. Getting old seemed to direct the focus quite strongly towards physical changes, and consequently towards oneself (see Penney, 2013). On the other hand, to avoid the physical and mental decline, the seniors in our group stressed how they must stay active by exercising sports, enjoying cultural services, by participating in public social events, and by keeping up their social relations. City officials and researchers discussed active ageing more in terms of how senior citizens could become active through the motivation offered by the city, by people in their nearby communities, or by technology.

In the non-mixed group of technology designers, some participants discussed ageing as a problem to be solved by other people than the aged themselves. Thus, seniors were not always granted the agency in their own lives. Instead technology, like well-being technologies installed in private homes, or GPS and ubiquitous technologies in public places were considered as agents who could look after and even nurture seniors. Smart devices could, for example, alarm seniors if they should enter ‘unsafe’ places (see Freund, 2001). The other designers, however, brought in the questions of privacy and self-determination. The method of starting in ‘non-mixed’ groups seemed to confuse the designers; and they turned towards their personal perceptions and experiences on the aged. In the city officials’ group, problems of ageing, like loneliness originated from living alone, was confronted with the tools of urban planning. Thus, designing new residential areas in a way that supports sense of community was underlined. In all groups, positive ageing meant active and independent life as well as satisfactory social relations (see James, Blomberg, Liljekvist, & Kihlgren, 2015).

Relying on designers’ personal experiences on, for example, ageing is often the working method when there are no participatory elements included (Genat, 2009). In the non-mixed groups, this meant that in their discussions and plans for the future, the city officials and designers made generalizations about the aged. They were pictured as a homogeneous group of citizens who need to be guarded, who are not very interested in broader social issues or who are reluctant users of new technologies. While imagining the utopian Oulu, the city officials described ageing citizens as modest and undemanding; and the technology designers concentrated on the frailest elderly who are in the need for care. The seniors also stressed the physical and cognitive changes of ageing, though they talked about the everyday lives of the aged as consisting of many activities. From the beginning, the seniors continuously reminded their co-participants about the heterogeneity of and the inequity between the aged. They stressed the struggles of less capable seniors who, for example, lived on the outskirts of the city, where public transportation is poor or non-existent (see Penney, 2013).

In the beginning of our workshop process, most participants, including the seniors, perceived ageing as a phase during which the aged are merely receiving information, without too much being part of its production. Information was understood as quite formal type of knowledge produced by those who have access to different kinds of sources. The Internet was usually considered as the main media for the access of updated information even though some seniors in the workshops said that they were not using it. This meant that if the ageing citizens were unwilling or unable to use the Internet, they were expected to learn to use it in the future (see Kanayama, 2003; Sourbati, 2009). Some city officials stated, however, ‘as their personal opinions’, that computing technologies should not be considered as the only solutions to the social challenges of ageing. But they too agreed that digitalization is unstoppable development in designing public services, also for seniors. Technology was thus mainly pictured as an unavoidable part of the future of the aged citizens. It was something others could design and offer to seniors to help them enhance sociality, have fun, gain information, but also to monitor and look after them. The aged were not seen as significant part of design process; and overall ageing as socially influential or creative state was mainly left unnoticed.

The aged as creative and powerful citizens

When our process proceeded to the mixing of the groups and thus to more co-generative learning and knowing, the phenomenon of ageing started to get more versatile shades. In the mixed groups the participants had to negotiate more about the solutions, and particularly consider the experiences of the seniors. The seniors emphasized, for example, their need to use the media they are accustomed to in parallel with new media. They also began to demand quite strongly agency for themselves against technology determinism (Richardson, Weaver, & Zorn, 2005). Some of the technology designers tried to convince the seniors that novel well-being technology would not demand good computer skills; but they did not consider that this easiness could lead to the loss of control which the seniors often value in their technology usage (Sourbati, 2009; Suopajärvi 2015). Designing e-services and new IT-applications for seniors is often based on the assumption that the ‘future’ seniors will be more capable and enthusiastic users of these technologies. Like many scholars of gerontechnology (Kanayama, 2003; Richardson et al., 2005; Sourbati, 2009), the seniors questioned this assumption.

Gradually, the participants started to see the aged citizens as part of the solution, not a problem. Their experiences and knowledge gained more and more attention. For example, while planning the ways the cross-generational lack of community could be resolved, some groups came up with an idea that while learning computer skills from adolescents, seniors could share their knowledge on household work and handicrafts. In this plan, the knowledge of the seniors was something they had generated through their earlier experiences but was perhaps not something they could generate now. While making plans about enhancing the two-way communication practices, the researchers introduced the possibility to connect offline and online media. Though they did not specify whether the city officials or decision-makers could partake in online discussions, this was one of the rare ideas of more two-way communication. The interaction in our workshops was a good example of the importance of dialogue. Some city officials pointed out that they would have missed the complicatedness of their service system without their discussions with the seniors.

In our last workshop, the participants reflected on what we had done; discussed whether seniors should be more involved in public design in general, and what would be good practices for these processes. All participants agreed that seniors should be more involved in design but most city officials claimed that this was already done by the city. Both ‘ordinary’ senior citizens, and the official ‘council of the elderly’ which includes mainly the representatives of the retiree associations of political parties, are invited to participate in many public design projects, they explained. This reflects the ongoing change, where public administration introduces civic participation as part of the new, more interactive society. It has been criticized that when participation is engendered by governmental institutions, its original ideology, namely radical social change generated by those in the margins, is forgotten. In the worst case, participation can be used as a strategy to justify the deconstruction of welfare services (Kesby, 2005; Ziegler and Scharf, 2013). Following these notions, it could be argued that those participatory projects which aim both for the involvement of citizens in order to create better services, and their empowerment, cannot be facilitated by governmental institutions.

In the workshop, the seniors said that, for once, they were heard; and that especially the discussions in smaller groups had enabled this. This implies that usually they feel ignored by the city. Though there are sincere efforts to include seniors in public design processes, the seniors in our workshop criticized that in practice only certain groups of seniors are able to participate, due to the city’s inability to recruit other seniors. Many seniors were critical towards the way the city operates ‘in secret’. Meeting the city officials who represented different departments of the city opened up the complexity of this organization to the rest of us. Bringing together these different people to discuss how senior citizens could be more involved in public design processes, made the seniors think about their positions as citizens and their possibilities to influence.

Not everyone is willing to participate but our workshops showed that there is a growing number of senior citizens who would like to be more involved. When the design focuses on a very limited issue, somebody has already decided, for example, what the themes to be worked on are. There is a risk that this does not leave enough space for the creativity of participants but instead they become commentators of the limited number of choices created by those in power (see Ataöv, 2007). The problem in participation is also that citizens are unfamiliar with how the city operates, like the forms and contents of design processes. The city architect in our workshop said that in their participatory projects, the citizens had expressed a need to know how they have influenced the design and its outcomes.

One aim of the workshops was to generate the empowerment of the seniors, while understanding that the empowerment is not something others deliver but it must be taken up by people themselves. In addition to becoming more outspoken and persistent in our process, the seniors got the encouragement to start looking for information about the services they might need. For some, this had happened already when they started to prepare for our first workshop, and the others followed their example. The seniors told that they had shared this information also with people outside our workshops. In the empowerment, it is essential that its practices extend beyond a small group of people; in our case, beyond the group of senior participants (Kesby, 2005). Yet, Kesby makes an interesting remark by following Nelson and Wright (1995), and asks ‘whether limited-life-span participatory projects actually disempower participants by giving them a sense of their problems but no means to tackle them’ (Kesby, 2005, pp. 2051). I find this question justified in the case of our PAR process, since we have not established any concrete or permanent form to strengthen the influence of senior citizens in public design processes. On the other hand, through our workshops, these seniors, but also their family members and friends, might have gained tools to empower themselves as citizens.

Meaningful components in our PAR intra-action

The way ageing and the aged citizens were pictured changed quite drastically during our workshop process. Turning to Barad’s new materialism, I ask what ‘components’ became meaningful in our process when we tried to understand what it means to be old in Oulu. Naturally, PAR process itself aims for producing new knowledge through bringing different stakeholders together and through using co-generative learning methods (Ataöv and Kahraman, 2009). Through the analysis of new materialism, I aim to reach the surprising, perhaps small details that enacted in our intra-actions in a way that the whole process, or in Barad’s terms phenomenon, changed its course.

From spirals to intra-actions

The feminist new materialism questions the spiral form of PAR by focusing on the intra-actions of the components that can seem quite small yet include big potential for change. The process does not repeat itself but is rather a continuum where different intra-actions constitute a phenomenon, in our case the phenomenon of ageing in a smart city of Oulu. The perspective also discloses the accountability of all agents, particularly of researchers, in order to understand the importance of the power dynamics. Feminist new materialism and PAR both make the ethnographer an agent that can, and also should, change the course of the stream. On the other hand, ethnography deepens the focus of the PAR study on the process itself and the practices between agents. In my study, the long-term research relationship that I had with the seniors enabled me to lead the stream gently towards a direction that would benefit them the most.

Feminist new materialism offers foremost an onto-epistemological shift to a PAR process. Like Barad writes, ‘Discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe, the “subjects” and “objects” of knowledge practices’ (2003, pp. 819). Reading PAR process through this perspective deepens our understanding on the socio-material power dynamics that affect the outcomes of the process. The material agents, like the meeting room tables and different media are as inseparable part of the process as the human co-participants. The particular intra-actions formed by these components are like underwater rocks that force the stream to take new directions. But we only become to know which components are meaningful through living the process. This perspective also changes the agency of the PAR methodology: it becomes part of the phenomenon instead of being a frame through which the phenomenon is studied. Underlining the agency of PAR helps us to comprehend the complexity through which the knowledge is constituted. The practical decisions we make in the process towards the change are influenced drastically by this knowledge. In our case this means that the change from seeing ageing as passive care receiving state to a state of active creative agency transforms the practical ideas of making a real life changes in the lives of senior citizens.