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

Older Australians' reluctance to adopt digital services is driven not only by skills gaps but by perceived risk — fear of scams, fraud, and losing control of personal information. Researchers from RMIT University's School of Design, School of Media and Communications and School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, working with the University of Waikato, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (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.

The team ran three in-person co-design workshops in Melbourne, Victoria, with 15 participants each (45 in total), all aged 65 and over. Using an original method the researchers call the 'Scenario Personarrative', participants enriched a spectrum of low-to-high digital-literacy personas and mapped their own responses onto realistic ICT scenarios, surfacing the specific barriers and coping strategies seniors actually use.

The workshop model and its results were published as a peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2022, presenting the Scenario Personarrative Method as a transferable format for other organisations running digital-inclusion or online-safety programmes with older adults.

The published study covers a single round of workshops with 45 participants in one city; no follow-up data was found showing whether participants' real-world ICT risk behaviour changed afterwards, or whether the model has since been repeated at scale by ACCAN, U3A or others.

Read the full analysis: https://research-repository.rmit.edu.au/articles/journal_contribution/Co-Creating_ICT_Risk_Strategies_with_Older_Australians_A_Workshop_Model/27564852