Supervised by: Minha Lee, Rens Brankaert, Wijnand IJsselsteijn

Time is increasingly researched in HCI, yet design often remains tied to normative temporal constructs, e.g., clocks and calendars. This is especially limiting in dementia contexts, where temporal experience is altered. Existing approaches largely enforce normative time and overlook futures, prioritizing the past for people with dementia. To explore how people with dementia and their partners experience time, we designed the Temporal Snapshots probe for 12 participants to reflect on temporal subjectivity across past and future moments. The probe surfaced layered narratives. Participants articulated fluid temporal associations, anchored narratives to personally meaningful moments, and situated themselves within future and past trajectories. We contribute empirical insights into how couples experience subjective time, a dual temporal lens for HCI, design directions for reframing time in dementia contexts, and methodological reflections on researching temporality. We foreground time as relational and co-constructed, challenging assumptions of linearity and fixed orientation in interaction design.

Intertemporal reflection, the ability to think flexibly across time, is crucial for future planning but can be difficult when considering challenging futures like dementia. This study explored how chatbot interactions shape attitudes toward dementia. Participants engaged with a chatbot presented as either neurotypical or simulating dementia symptoms, framed as their future selves or a stranger. While the changes in attitudes toward dementia were statistically insignificant, the chatbot interaction influenced experiences. A future-self chatbot fostered emotional connection and reflection on aging, especially when simulating dementia. When framed as a stranger, the chatbot’s cognitive decline frustrated task-oriented participants. Thus, chatbots can aid reflection on difficult futures, but their effectiveness depends on tensions between simulated cognitive decline and expectations for effective communication.

Assistive technology today is largely designed for the measurable aspect of time, thus not addressing flexible, subjective experiences and cultural needs. In this paper, we first briefly look at the landscape of assistive technologies for dementia. Then, we visualise the experience of time in dementia and the mismatch between technology and people through two scenarios. We briefly dive into the evolution of timekeeping and time of various cultures to look at the lost perspectives of time and make the modern-day dependency on clocks explicit. Finally, the paper nudges the reader to re-think the future of technology design through a multi-temporal lens that is inclusive of the flexible and intuitive perspectives of time to look beyond the technological impositions of commoditised time.