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“What do you mean?”
Exploring Interdisciplinary Frictions when Designing for Longevity
Elisa Cardamone
Advanced Care Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Yoni Lefévre
LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Genk, Belgium & Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh,
United Kingdom
With a projected global population of 2.1 billion individuals aged 60 and older by
2050, there is an imperative to explore the implications of living longer and how
to design solutions that support individuals’ well-being and promote
independence. In this context, interdisciplinary collaborations, by bringing
together different forms of expertise, can provide creative and effective solutions.
However, the complexities of working in synergy with others are rarely
discussed. Drawing from our experiences as early academic researchers, we delve
into the nuances of interdisciplinary design research for an ageing population.
Through autoethnographic dialogues between the authors and semi-structured
interviews with professionals from various disciplines, we uncover and discuss
frictions inherent in interdisciplinary collaborations. Our findings reveal tensions
surrounding data interpretation, ontological and epistemological beliefs,
evaluation of project outcomes, and ethical considerations. We propose an initial
framework to navigate these frictions constructively, fostering dialogue and
understanding among team members. By prioritising lived experiences and
reflexivity, our work contributes practical insights for interdisciplinary
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collaboration in designing for longevity, offering a lens into the complexities and
opportunities of navigating disciplinary boundaries.
Keywords: ageing, interdisciplinarity, friction, autoethnography
Introduction
November 12th, 2023
Today, I, Yoni Lefévre, a design researcher [author 2], was visiting Elisa Cardamone, a
medical anthropologist [author 1], a fellow PhD student. While we sat on her loafing light-
grey couch, chatting, on the coffee table next to me, I saw a book: Design Anthropology:
Theory and Practice (Gunn, et al., 2013). It was the same book I had just finished reading!
[Author 1] She immediately asked me what she thought of it. I told her that I was hoping to
understand further how researchers had been collaborating across the two disciplines. Later,
between a bite of lasagne and some white wine, we talked about design theories and
anthropological understandings of ageing, experiences of working with researchers from
other disciplines and various challenges. “We should do this again. Meet and talk more about
these interdisciplinary frictions,” she said. “Yes, we could even write an article about it.
There must be others experiencing the same thing,” I replied.
With a projected 2.1 billion people worldwide reaching the age of 60 and older by
2050 (WHO, 2022), in addition to new treatments and earlier identification of diseases
increasing individuals’ longevity, there is an urgent need to explore the complexities of living
longer, designing products and services for older adults that support their well-being and
quality of life (Merkel & Kucharski, 2019; Soto et al., 2022; Aigner-Walder et al., 2023).
With the advent of COVID-19 and digitisation becoming ubiquitous, new opportunities and
challenges have also arisen across all sectors, including inequalities in health and social care,
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transport and mobility needs, and housing, requiring solutions that extend beyond single
fields of knowledge (Peine et al., 2021). New interdisciplinary frameworks and approaches
such as Socio-Gerontechnology (Peine et al., 2022) and Design for Longevity (D4L, Lee et
al., 2024) are now emerging at the intersection of different knowledge terrains (Carstensen,
2011; Lee et al., 2023), aiming to identify new design opportunities for products and services
that “allow people to thrive across their entire lifespan in the context of transforming age
demographics” (Lee et al., 2024; Marcelino et al., 2015; Rivero, 2018).
More recently, design for longevity (D4L) has been successfully translated and
applied to other fields, such as financial planning, business strategies, the built environment,
and social health (Lee et al., 2024; Manchester & Jarke, 2022; Engelen et al., 2022; Peine &
Neven, 2019; Marcelino et al., 2015; Coughlin, 2009; Wright, 2004; Lehrer, 2012; Hansson,
1999). In parallel, scholars across socio-gerontechnology have defined “longevity science
[as] a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to resolving difficulties and questions posed
by a scenario in which most people […] live decades beyond the touchpoint of sixty-five”
(Carstensen, 2011. p. 186) requiring the design of solutions from different perspectives.
However, interdisciplinary work is rarely easy, and issues around diverging ethical,
methodological, ontological, and epistemological views often arise (Dusdal & Powell, 2021;
Klein, 2021; Specht & Crowston, 2022; Borgman, 2012; Bracken & Oughton, 2006), with
some scholars arguing that “effective collaboration across disciplinary or national boundaries
does not result from simply putting people together in a room and shutting the door”
(Panagiotidou et al., 2022: p. 2). Existing interdisciplinary frameworks to facilitate this kind
of work include: sets of questions to consider the benefits, motivations, and challenges of
international collaborative research (Dusdal & Powell, 2021), a research model encompassing
inputs (e.g., gender), mediators (e.g., cited publications), and outputs (e.g., personal
satisfaction) (Specht & Crowston, 2022), and a list of principles for synergistic
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communication across science, design, and art (Ellison & Buckley Border, 2022). However,
how researchers negotiate differing views, epistemological and methodological beliefs, and
even cultural norms in design research for longevity is yet to be investigated.
Therefore, starting from the idea that bringing diverse perspectives in design practice
for longevity can be an opportunity to spur creativity and craft innovative, holistic solutions
to the challenges faced by the ageing population and that design for longevity (D4L) as a lens
can guide us in designing across multiple domains of life such as health, education,
investment, and community, we ask: how can we navigate ethical, epistemological,
ontological, and methodological differences productively, moving the design research project
forward?
To address this question, first, we embarked on a series of autoethnographic
interviews to explore our backgrounds, views on ageing, and expectations for design’s future
role. Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews with four experts from different
disciplines (Design Innovation, Public Health, Geriatric Medicine, and Industrial Design),
discussing the productive potential of friction in shaping innovative outcomes. Lastly,
building on our discussion of frictions and existing research on collaborative studies (Ellison
& Buckley Borden, 2022; Specht & Crowston, 2022; Dusdal & Powell, 2021), we developed
a framework with questions for navigating such frictions constructively.
Informed by a phenomenological perspective (Blackwell et al., 2009), our work
prioritises lived experiences to contribute practical insights for interdisciplinary collaboration
in design research for ageing populations. Suchman (2011, p. 15) has already argued for the
importance of revealing the curiosities and conflicts by “articulating the tricky politics of
friction (as) a continuing and integral aspect of engagement”. It is these very situations and
their frames that our work engages with.
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Methodology
Our main concern was to record and analyse how researchers from different fields negotiate a
shared analytic framework to carry out design research projects that support people in living
long, healthy, and independent lives. Since we, the authors, are embedded in this research
ourselves and inquire into the everyday experiences of other researchers, we have adopted a
phenomenological, autoethnographic approach (Anderson, 2006; Wall, 2016; Poulos, 2021,
p. 4; Müller, 2021). By valuing knowledge generated through personal experience and self-
reflexivity (Ellis et al., 2010), autoethnography invites us to look inward, evaluating and
observing the effects of our practice, opening up a new space for learning in the design
research process (Schön, 1983). Although autoethnography is a subjective, first-person-based
methodology (Anderson, 2006; Wall, 2016), we believe that it represents a valuable tool to
unravel and make sense of our and others’ lived experiences, uncovering forms of implicit,
undatafied knowledge that often remains invisible in the design research process (Munro,
2011; Schouwenberg & Kaethler, 2021). Additionally, when triangulated with expert
interviews, autoethnography can be an innovative qualitative interview approach to
investigate implicit forms of expert knowledge, merging a theory-generating expert interview
with a problem-centred view, offering a dialogic procedure to investigate individual
perspectives and how they “affect [design] practices in a field of action” (Döringer, 2020,
p.1). See Figure 1 for an overview of the research steps.
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Figure 1. The research process and steps for identifying key frictions in design for longevity. ©Illustration by
the authors.
Recruitment
The expert interviews aimed to understand how different frictions are experienced in
interdisciplinary teams (Table 1). Four participants were recruited through the authors’
academic and professional networks. They were chosen based on their backgrounds to add a
different contextual lens to the framework, building further on the author’s profiles. All
experts were invited and informed via email on the project’s aim—discussing a potential
framework for interdisciplinary frictions—and were asked to sign a consent form before the
interviews, agreeing to their voluntary participation. The discussion guide and consent form
of the expert interviews are documented in the Appendix.
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Gender, age, nationality
Background and work context
Expert 1
Female, 30-40, UK
Anthropology, design innovation, industry
Expert 2
Female, 40-50, UK
Policy making, public health, education
Expert 3
Female, 50-60, UK
Geriatric medicine, clinical research, teaching
Expert 4
Male, 30-40, AU
Industrial design, ageing, academic research
Author 1
Female, 20-30, IT
Medical anthropology, ageing, technology
Author 2
Female, 30-40, NL
Participatory design, design research, ageism
Table 1. Demographics of participants and authors.
Research Method and Process
We first organised four two-hour-long autoethnographic dialogues between us, which took
place in a mix of online and in-person settings. The conversations were a preliminary
exploration of our respective research fields (design and anthropology), and we used them to
unpack methodological, epistemological, and ontological differences. This helped us sketch
an initial framework that could serve as a starting point to unravel such implicit frictions in
other interdisciplinary research environments through expert interviews.
Following the autoethnographic conversations, we organised four 40-minute long,
online, semi-structured interviews with experts. Our aim was to critically discuss in what
ways the identified frictions could be relevant for others when designing for longevity. Thus,
we worked on a pre-determined set of open questions, looking to understand people’s
motivations, values, and personal experiences (Lee et al., 2023). The interviews were
structured in three parts:
(1) Introductory questions: “From which perspective are you looking at ageing? How
would you describe your own discipline, and why do you think it is important [in the
context of longevity]?”
(2) Presentation of the initial framework through Miro—an online whiteboard (Figure
2)—and follow-up questions: “How did you discuss disciplinary differences relating
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to ethical concerns and researchers’ positionality? Were there any conflicting
expectations from other disciplines about deliverables, outputs, or implementation?”
(3) Final reflection: “In what way would a framework that explicitly looks at frictions
contribute to your interdisciplinary work or practice?”
Figure 2. The initial framework shared during the expert interviews through Miro, concerning frictions around
positionality, interdisciplinary collaborations, and output. ©Illustration by the authors.
Analysis and Synthesis
The online interviews, both between the authors and with the experts, were automatically
transcribed using Microsoft Teams. Following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis,
we coded the autoethnographic dialogues separately, compared them to each other, creating
clusters of emerging topics in Miro, and drawing connections through iterative rounds. Data
analysis softwares, NVivo and Atlas.ti, were used to code and generate an initial TreeMap to
cross-compare emerging themes (Figure 3 & 4). One of us noticed a whole set of implicit
frictions—apparently tangential moments, exclamations, and comments in the conversation—
besides the originally defined themes of positionality, outputs, and temporality, in which we
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disclosed different interpretations of the same data. Through further dialogues, additional
codes such as reflexivity emerged as part of positionality, and research approach and
interdisciplinarity as part of explicit frictions.
Figure 3. Tree Map generated on NVivo by author 1 to visualise and cross-compare codes.
Figure 4. Tree map generated on Atlas.ti by author 2 and added post-its in Miro to understand key differences
We then started visualising the interdisciplinary frictions on a double-diamond
timeline, generally used in design research processes (Figure 5). This allowed us to identify
possible key frictions along the different stages of the design research project.
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Figure 5. Understanding interdisciplinary friction between author 1 and author 2, based on the double diamond
developed by The Design Council (2004).
Through further dialogues between the authors, we proposed an initial framework,
looking at frictions across different stages of a design research process. We discussed this
with participants during the expert interviews. Afterwards, the framework was refined based
on a second round of coding and analysis of the expert interviews (Table 1).
Code
Identify tensions
Understanding
own limitations
Language
barriers
Table 1. Example of codes used to analyse the semi-structured expert interviews.
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Limitations
This work presents limitations based on personal experiences and realities, mainly reflecting
views of design, health, and care for an ageing population in the Global North. This impacted
the interpretation of the findings while potentially limiting their applicability to different
communities. Importantly, we acknowledge the existence of other beliefs and practices
around design, care, and longevity and encourage research considering other socio-technical
systems and contexts, which might present very different ontologies and epistemologies.
Moreover, for clarity, we have referred to participants in this text by their discipline,
oversimplifying their individual traits and possibly their knowledge areas.
Autoethnography as a methodology has also been critiqued as individualised and self-
absorbed (Anderson 2006; Atkinson 2006). However, we see autoethnography’s unruliness,
playfulness, and creativity as opening up a fertile space to record and assess struggles,
passions, lived experiences, and the collaborative sense-making in which we take part when
working in design for longevity (Ellis & Bochner, 2006). A salve to social scientific
criticism, autoethnographic conversations also offer a methodological space for value
frictions to co-exist or to be negotiated. Beyond its function as a tool for self-reflection,
autoethnography also worked as a tool for methodological enjoyability. We genuinely
enjoyed the process and found that autoethnography could be a social, cultural, and political
lubricant when discussing ageing, care, and design interventions, allowing ideas to flow into
fruitful and unexpected co-production relations.
Results
In conversation with different experts, we identified four main frictions that shape the
ideation, development, and implementation of design research projects. Each of the frictions
is discussed in the subsections below.
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Friction 1: All researchers hold different views on ageing. How these influences
ontological and epistemological approaches and decision making in the design process
needs to be explored.
“How interesting that everybody starts with their personal story. Like there’s no other
[instance] where somebody will go [...] you know, ‘my brother has had a heart attack and
so I understand, or my sister-in-law has diabetes.’ [...] Everybody has a perspective on
[ageing]”.
With these words, a geriatrician shared with us why ageing would be different than
any other field of study: because it is almost impossible to research it without having a
preconceived idea of what it means to grow older. In other words, as researchers we never
come into a project as a tabula rasa but rather, we carry with us a baggage of experiences and
views that will influence how we make decisions.
Besides, working in a specific discipline or sector means having consolidated a set
of approaches to work with and ideas of who should be involved in creating knowledge – for
example survey research versus ethnography or workshops. Chances are that we often take
for granted those very ideas and views. It is when “brushing off” others, as it happens in
interdisciplinary research, that these assumptions are disclosed to us, coming to the forefront
of the design table.
Negotiating different ontological and epistemological positions with others to
establish what ageing “well” means, who to include in a design research project, how to
engage them, what data is relevant, and what defines impact, is not easy. Some of our experts
mentioned that interdisciplinary work is a process of constant learning by acknowledging
their own limitations and valuing the richness of the work when combined with other
disciplines to create meaningful change: “I think design is a method for change. It really felt
like I’m being given a framework to do what I wanted to do.”
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However, this process also implicates designers and researchers being confronted
with unfamiliar approaches, methods, and vocabularies, requiring some guidance in
navigating new research domains, as two experts share:
“I really struggle with some of the verbose language that you encounter in qualitative
research. […] It immediately becomes alienating to decision makers, to the general
public, and to the people who really need to hear it and act on it.”
“I mean, there are challenges, but there are positives and we do need to think about the
converse of the frictions, which are the facilitators and the positives of working in
teams.”
Thus, even if navigating different views on ageing and what methods to employ is not
always a straightforward process, by engaging in dialogues with openness and reflexivity,
interdisciplinary teams can navigate differences, converging in the same direction.
Friction 2: How we generate, organise, interpret, and share data changes across
disciplines. Finding a common ground on how to use it can promote creative solutions.
What we think of as data, how we generate it, organise it, make sense of it, and share it vary
across disciplines. This became evident as soon as we looked at each other’s coding practices.
While author 2 as a designer coded explicitly articulated frictions, such as one of us stating “I
feel limited in my own discipline”, author 1 as an anthropologist underlined the implicit ones,
those that did not appear in the text but could be extrapolated from exclamations and long
pauses: “Mmm…I see…”. Furthermore, what data we have will impact the approach we take
in a project. Author 2 as a designer had a solution-oriented approach, seeking to address the
explicit frictions and challenges she identified. On the other end, author 1 emphasised how
implicit frictions could supersede our conversation, getting entangled with broader discourses
on personal values, motivations, and ethics—as such, they should not be ‘solved’ but
explored. If left unpacked, these differences in how we generate, interpret, and use data can
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become disagreements, instances of miscommunication between colleagues, and hierarchical
views within a team of what data is trustworthy and relevant.
When talking to expert 1, a service designer, it became clear that finding common
ground for generating and using data in design research projects is not only essential but can
also promote creative solutions:
“Sometimes I get lost in my data and I really do make it incredibly complicated. When I
worked with designers, I was always in awe, and I really learned that skill of pulling
back from [the data]. No matter how complicated, no matter how paralysing, […]
[designers] will just make something out of it.”
Another expert highlighted that a certain degree of curiosity and flexibility towards
data is needed: “[One needs to] appreciate that through the process things will have to
change. So, [you should] be flexible to what the data shows and what use you can make of
it.”
Therefore, while different approaches to data interpretation across disciplines might
pose challenges to teams with experts from different fields, establishing a shared
understanding of how data will be collected, analysed, and communicated can allow teams to
come up with innovative insights and solutions which are the result of a unique data synthesis
process.
Friction 3: Ethical considerations when engaging communities look different across
disciplines but are also deeply personal.
Including human participants is not a standard practice across all disciplines. When it is,
engaging older adults raises questions about ethics and researchers’ positionality.
Anthropologists, for example, immerse themselves in communities for months or years while
designers engage with people for shorter amounts of time through workshops, cultural
probes, or interviews. Embedding oneself in a care home or a palliative care ward arguably
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exposes the researcher to very different situations and conversations than meeting older
adults who are living independently during a workshop or a feasibility study. What we see
and hear in these contexts varies, and so does our personal ethical and moral stance to report
it or leave it, to ask more questions or to change the topic: “There’s an issue about excluding
[older] people from studies because it’s seen as complicated and difficult and therefore, we
only do research with the people for whom it seems to be easy.”
Design as a discipline also has an aptitude for intervening, entering spaces with
predefined ideas and activities tailored to achieve a specific purpose. Thus, it stimulates
participants it invites them to leave their space and share, rethink, and probe back.
Anthropologists prefer to recede in the background, observing and not intervening. They
want to understand what people would routinely do – they should not act differently because
a researcher is in the house or is going grocery shopping with them. Undoubtedly, both
approaches are charged with various ethical implications and bear the potential of disrupting
older adults’ privacy, sense of safety, and emotional state. Accordingly, what is ethical,
considerate, and appropriate needs to be discussed among interdisciplinary teams:
“I think anthropologists at least try to meet people where they are ... and that’s the bit
they want to know about. Whereas designers are maybe more inclined to take people out
of their comfort and put them into some form of creative workshop or like a different
space and let them engage and make things [...]. I think a lot of it is because designers
don’t have time and are not trained to jump into a context, explore it [in depth] like an
anthropologist.”
Most importantly, ethical concerns supersede disciplinary boundaries, tapping into
our own moral and ethical compass:
I’m thinking how I can have this conversation with someone: ‘I’m interested in you
because you’re over 50 but looking at where you live and your financial background,
you’re probably not gonna see 70,’ like that is a hard conversation.
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Therefore, teams should discuss notions of positionality, ethics, vulnerability, and
resilience, reflecting on their responsibility to conduct research that will positively impact the
life of the people they are designing for.
Friction 4: How we evaluate project and design outcomes says a lot about whose lived
experience we value most.
What constitutes an output, our expectations around deliverables, and how we should
communicate our work to different audiences were some questions we first explored during
our autoethnographic dialogues. Designers possess skills to present their work in visually
creative and appealing formats. Sometimes, their output is a product or service. Other times,
it consists of a website, an exhibition, or other designed interventions. In anthropology, an
output often takes the shape of a report, a documentary, or a book. While exploring these
differences and asking each other how we know whether we have done well, we noticed a
particular tension between our disciplines about the notions of success and failure:
Author 2: So, your project can never fail?
Author 1: Yeah, not really.
Author 2: I think within design, there’s definitely a view of that we can fail. Because it’s
so solution-oriented (in industry) ...if it doesn’t work, we fail.
The pressure to perform well, to produce something that will work, can create friction
within interdisciplinary project teams, causing researchers to disagree on how long a
deployment should take or how many usability tests are feasible. Other outputs, such as
publications, can also vary in structure and content across disciplines. Tight budgets, limited
timeframes to deliver results, and rotation of team members bring additional pressures and
raise questions on how to keep producing excellent work while safeguarding data’s quality
and analysis in addition to team cohesion. When an expert was asked about the discrepancy
between best practice and constraints on timeframes and budgets, she mentioned that