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Good practice Imported

Scenario Personarrative Workshops — Co-Creating ICT Risk Strategies with Older Australians

Australia · Melbourne · See the Australia profile · See the Melbourne profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 82% 52/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

RMIT University, with ACCAN and the University of the Third Age, ran three co-design workshops (45 participants aged 65+) using a 'Scenario Personarrative' method so older Australians could shape their own strategies for reducing perceived ICT risk.

45 participants
Total participants (aged 65+)
3 workshops
Co-design workshops held
15 participants
Participants per workshop

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
RMIT University, with Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) and University of the Third Age (U3A)
Period
2021–2022
Keywords
digital literacy, cybersecurity, older adults, co-design research

Context

Older Australians' reluctance to adopt digital services is driven not only by skills gaps but by perceived risk of scams, fraud and losing control of personal information; researchers from RMIT University, the University of Waikato, ACCAN and the University of the Third Age (U3A) set out to let older adults design their own risk-reduction strategies rather than receive prescriptive advice.

Objectives

Develop and test an original 'Scenario Personarrative' method — enriching digital-literacy personas and mapping participants' own responses onto realistic ICT scenarios — as a transferable format for digital-inclusion and online-safety programmes with older adults.

Activities

The team ran three in-person co-design workshops in Melbourne with 15 participants each (45 in total), all aged 65 and over, surfacing the specific barriers and coping strategies seniors actually use.

Results

The workshop model and its results were published as a peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2022), presenting the method as reusable by other organisations.

Conclusions

The published study covers a single round of workshops with 45 participants in one city; no follow-up data shows whether participants' real-world ICT risk behaviour changed afterwards, or whether the model has since been repeated at scale.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
RMIT University research team (School of Design; School of Media and Communications; School of Economics, Finance and Marketing) with the University of Waikato, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) and the University of the Third Age (U3A) as delivery/community partners

Conditions for success

  • Used an original 'Scenario Personarrative' method combining enriched digital-literacy personas with realistic ICT scenarios so participants could design their own risk-reduction strategies rather than receive prescriptive advice
  • Partnered with a national consumer advocacy body (ACCAN) and a seniors' education network (U3A) to reach and engage the target population

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Replication kit

Reusable artefacts from this practice — as published by their sources.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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