Space and Time: Helping Kids and Grandparents Feel Closer Via Design

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-min + Q&A with Thea Blackler Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: Intergenerational relationships between young children and older relatives play an important role in in family connection and well-being. For young children, who are undergoing rapid physical and cognitive development, the support and companionship of older relatives can contribute to healthy physical and psychological development. For older relatives, intergenerational interaction can help reduce loneliness and may improve health. Designing technologies for intergenerational interaction requires approaches that can encompass the diverse cultural practices and everyday experiences that shape relationships between older adults and young children across geographical boundaries. This lecture will discuss a large project investigating tangible technologies for geographically distanced intergenerational interaction. We have so far conducted interview and co-design activities and will reveal what we have found so far and how we intend to use our data to create and test tangible technologies can help build stronger connections between geographically separated families. Project website: https://research.qut.edu.au/dttfdii/ Your Speaker: Professor Thea Blackler (PhD) is a Professor in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and recently served as the inaugural Associate Dean Research for the large new Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice at QUT. Her research interests cover the areas of intuitive interaction, older people and technology and design for dementia, and novel technologies for young children and their grandparents. She has attracted and worked with external partners in government, community and industry on various projects and has had four Australian Research Council grants. Across her career, she has published more than 120 peer reviewed papers and won almost $10M AUD in research funding.