ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on socio-gerontechnologies is the issue of care and how, as more technological solutions are sought to provide care of older people, more problems arise requiring critical attention. Technological inclusive/exclusive design is a prominent problem in gerontechnological culture because older people, reduced to ‘users’, are frequently neglected in technological design, unless their input conforms to designer priorities and complements production schedules. Ageist images of older people as invariably fragile, needy and technically inept are also technically ‘scripted’ into product design. The technical formulation of care, from the design perspective, is also based on interventionist and ‘solutionist’ models that target what Michela Cozza, again, calls ‘elderliness’, marked by crude polarities of abled/disabled, active/passive and dependent/independent.
