Communities of everyday practice and situated elderliness as an approach to co-design for senior interaction

Abstract

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.

Minding the Gap: Reconciling Human and Technical Perspectives on the IoT for Healthy Ageing

“…In fact a large proportion of older adults do not consider themselves "old"and live autonomously [43,44] and enjoy meaningful engagement with their families and their broader community [45]. Durick and colleagues reaffirm that older age does not necessarily entail being stagnant, isolated, a problem for society, and unhealthy or being incapable to learn new technology [25].…”

“…There's a need to look further into the subtlety and nuances of how routines and interactions are managed [54], how mundane arrangements are enacted [2], and how communities of practice are comprised [43] in seeking to design for independence, agency, and engagement. Considering the themes above could lead to successful design strategies to create IoT technologies that support the ageing population [4].…”

Practice-based Design of a Neighborhood Portal

“…In addition, to our knowledge there is no work which affords empirical insights on related negotiation and decision processes in such broader real-life research settings. Besides reporting on challenges and obstacles linked to the need to permanently balance all stakeholders' visions, the paper deals with another aspect which is novel in Living Lab research: some researchers reported problems and strategies in the recruitment of suitable participants and on the impacts of their choice in the course of the project [4,31]. A design project located in a city quarter neighborhood is confronted with the situation to tackle a high diversity of possible future end-users, but will not be able to integrate every person in that shared living environment.…”

“…to establish a shared thinking space of future possibilities (in a similar vein as e.g. described in [4]). Two essential features are the basis of the workshops: First, the delivery of off-the-shelf technology and support in individual and group-based appropriation, which is strongly linked to the individual's every-day life issues.…”

“…These are often based on a low familiarity with new media. This results in anxieties and reluctance to accustom themselves to new media and hence affords certain measures for developing technology which is meaningful and useful to the elderly [4,22,40].…”