Neil Charness, Walter Boot to go to France for CREATE workshop on designing for older adults

Neil Charness, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Successful Longevity, and Walter Boot, Ph.D., a Faculty Affiliate of the institute, will be in Bordeaux, France, in late September to meet with other researchers in a workshop on their CREATE project, which focuses on designing technology for older adults.

Joining Charness and Boot, both professors in FSU’s Department of Psychology, will be Sara Czaja, Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine, and Wendy A. Rogers, Ph.D. of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All are part of the CREATE research team.

At the workshop, Charness, Boot and the CREATE team will meet with French researchers and lead discussions on an array of topics related to well-crafted designs that work for older individuals.

“An important goal for the CREATE group is to disseminate our findings about how best to design and train technology for our aging population,” Charness said. “Our workshop in Bordeaux will help make our research more accessible to those in France and the EU, countries with even older populations than that in the USA.”

CREATE — the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement — is a long-term project, funded by the National Institute on Aging, that brings together researchers from five institutions: FSU, Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech University, and the University of Miami.

Established in 1999, CREATE is a multidisciplinary and collaborative center dedicated to ensure that the benefits of technology can be realized by older adults. The center strives to develop and evaluate interventions and design solutions to promote successful technology adoption among older individuals.

The CREATE team’s publications include Designing for Older Adults: Principles and Creative Human Factors Approaches, now in its third edition, and Designing for Older Adults: Case Studies, Methods and Tools.