Design for social media engagement: Insights from elderly care assistance

•Strategic role of social media technologies in the elderly care domain.•IS design as an emergent process for engagement and learning.•Principles for achieving personalized elderly care assistance through social media.•Prospective and normative knowledge contributions of action design research.•Ensemble artifact view on social media to enhance quality of life.

This paper explores an alternative view of design as an emergent process of engagement and learning, as opposed to the traditional view of systems design as a problem-solving tool. We focus on digitally enabled elderly support networks as an innovative approach to the design of elderly care assistance through social media. Our research project is conducted in the context of an Italian health-care institution and provides the empirical backdrop illustrating the ensemble artefact, the four design principles and the pragmatic outcomes of personalized elderly care interventions. These contributions add both practical and theoretical guidance and learning regarding social-media engagement in elderly care assistance. Further, we illustrate how the design of personalized services through social-media technologies may challenge traditional organizational boundaries and transform the relationship between internal and external stakeholders. Based on our findings, the conclusion is that personalized elderly care assistance emerges as a socio-technical construction of social media.