In the co-design project Senior Interaction a public care unit, university researchers, industrial partners, and senior citizens are working together to design living labs applying digital concepts that can strengthen social networks and interaction among seniors. When approaching people who we envisioned to be the future users we realized that almost nobody among the people between 55 and 75 years old identified themselves as 'elderly' or 'senior citizens', we realized that users are never just 'out there'. Instead they tend to refer to 'the others' or even to their own parents. Rather than using biological age, institutional categories or similar formal ways to group the people that we imagine as the future users, we suggest to talk about situated elderliness. By associating elderliness not to all encompassing life circumstances but to certain everyday contexts we can turn our attention towards what we call communities of everyday practice that defines these contexts.

In this paper we report our early experience with the design of technology for senior citizens. We take as our point of departure a pre-study of the ways in which older adult living occurs at three different senior housing facilities in southern Sweden. We contribute to the current debate concerning the ways in which digital technology can be designed to enable new types of living arrangements for the ever growing population of older people. We focus on technology designed to support the social rather than physical challenges of growing older. In particular we discuss how designing for social interaction can circumvent the stigma associated with being lonely in light of diminishing social networks, changed patterns of interactions with family, moving to a new neighbourhood, and the loss of a spouse. We will suggest that designers, in the design of digital technology for social interaction, deliberately leave room for ambiguity to make it possible for people to leave their intentions of use unarticulated. Furthermore, recognizing that many everyday activities already act as enablers for social interaction, we suggest utilizing such activities as an approach for design. We will support our suggestions by introducing three perspectives: a perspective emphasizing that the population of older adults is one of resourceful individuals; a perspective on social interaction emphasizing its circumstantial nature as an inherent part of everyday activities; and a perspective on the role of digital technology emphasizing its role as merely one of many resources present for human action. Finally, we will present an example concept showing how an enhanced TV remote control may be designed to enable social interactions without inflicting too much on the original experience of watching TV and most importantly, without stigmatizing the people using the remote control as lonely individuals craving the company of others.

Abstract. The industrial control room has been a strong shaping image for design of information technology at process plants and even for information and control systems in other areas. Based on recent studies of the work of process operators and on ethnographically inspired fieldwork this paper question the relevance of control room type interfaces. The paper suggests new types of mobile interfaces, which enables the operators to configure and apply individual temporary views of the plant, originating in the problem focus of the operator. To explore the relevance of such new interfaces a number of design concepts are suggested. The design of a particular device: The Pucketizer (Personal Bucket Organizer) has been developed in close collaboration with process operators at a wastewater treatment plant. The paper concludes that mobile interfaces for spatially distributed interaction such as the Pucketizer seem to have generic qualities reaching beyond the immediate context at process plants.

The AROMA project is exploring the kind of awareness that people effortless are able to maintain about other beings who are located physically close. We are designing technology that attempts to mediate a similar kind of awareness among people who are geographically dispersed but want to stay better in touch. AROMA technology can be thought of as a stand-alone communication device or -more likely --an augmentation of existing technologies such as the telephone or full-blown media spaces. Our approach differs from other recent designs for awareness (a) by choosing pure abstract representations on the display site, (b) by possibly remapping the signal across media between capture and display, and, finally, (c) by explicitly extending the application domain to include more than the working life, to embrace social interaction in general.We are building a series of prototypes to learn if abstract representation of activity data does indeed convey a sense of remote presence and does so in a sutTiciently subdued manner to allow the user to concentrate on his or her main activity. We have done some initial testing of the technical feasibility of our designs. What still remains is an extensive effort of designing a symbolic language of remote presence, done in parallel with studies of how people will connect and communicate through such a language as they live with the AROMA system.

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