Playing the platform: Leveraging play and surprise to explore home meal delivery platforms in later life

The rapid platformization of food delivery for the ageing population presents a critical tension: while supporting ageing in place and combating high rates of food insecurity, automated services risk reducing the vital practice of food preparation – a core site of self-care and agency – to transactional logistics driven by algorithms that favour efficiency and standardization over lived experience. This article explores how food platforms can promote care, agency and emotional engagement through a Research-through-Design study, Playing the Platform . In this two-month embodied role-play, the lead researcher performed the service in participants’ homes, leveraging play, surprise and improvisation to address three research questions: how do home meal delivery platforms intersect with the physical, spatial and material realities of older adults’ domestic environments? How do home meal delivery platforms reshape older adults’ self-care and caregiving practices? How might play and surprise surface emotional, relational and material dimensions of food in later life that are often obscured by platform logistics of efficiency? Findings demonstrate that this playful approach fosters reciprocity and agency, generating rich insights into the physical, emotional and relational dimensions of cooking in later life. Crucially, small moments of surprise – unexpected ingredients or collaborative cooking decisions – transform routine food provision into meaningful events. These insights reveal how home meal delivery platforms can move beyond efficiency to support older adults’ autonomy, well-being and connection, offering design directions for integrating playful and meaningful interactions into essential care services.