Matters of time: the different times of technological innovation and care practice.

Time is a matter of great concern to healthcare and eldercare. In situations of austerity, time is both an essential resource and an issue – what to spend time on? how to save time? Care and innovation both consume time, but they are also practices that generate (or assemble) time in different ways.

This paper explores the different ways of assembling ageing, time, technology and care in differently located practices; a Danish innovation project aiming at developing technologies for older people, and a Danish home care unit seeking to implement new technologies of care. Drawing on empirical observations of the controversies emerging around time and technology, we inquire into the ontology of time.

Performative approaches to care and innovation have asked questions about the socio-material nature of things like technology, bodies, disease and care. In this paper we engage with the materiality of time, and ask how different material practices perform time in different ways.

Based on ethnographic observations of controversies around time in practices of eldercare and innovation we ask what kind of a thing is time?
Technologies for care-work promise to save and recover time, but, we contend, they also change what time is, which creates controversies when implemented in practice where other types of time prevail.