Paper long abstract:

The aging population is seen as one of the greatest challenges European societies will face in the upcoming decades and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is framed as one promising solution. I assume AAL systems/products/services, their users and society to be co-produced (Jasanoff, 2004) in RTD practices, which are simultaneously shaped by and productive of broader visions of the collective good. A required part of RTD practice in projects funded under the European Commission's AAL Joint Programme or the Austrian benefit programme is user involvement, which I understand as an array of practices of enacting and negotiating sociomaterial values. Multiple stakeholders are hereby included in the RTD process, who might come with their specific vision of what a well-aging society is and what needs to be done to get there. In this paper I will inquire which practices of user involvement are deemed valuable by differently situated actors in order to work towards a well-aging society, appropriate user representations and, accordingly, a successful system/product/service. Drawing on preliminary empirical results from my PhD-project (document analysis and qualitative interviews with project workers) I will focus on practices of good RTD in the AAL context and explore what work is needed for a multiplicity of values to be given space in RTD practice and how tensions between differing versions of goodness and clashing visions of attainable futures are balanced.