Elderly’s everyday practices as a design approach
Abstract
This workshop is oriented towards experiences in design using communities of everyday practice and situated elderliness as a design approach. Originally the notion of communities of practice was used in the understanding of situated learning processes in organizations, but it has also become quite influential in participatory design as a way of understanding relations between different groups of users in a specific context [6]. In this workshop focus is on how we can use the notion of communities of practice notion as a design approach when working with elderly. The participants will share experiences, identify major challenges when working in this field, and discuss possible ways to approach these challenges.
Author Keywords
Communities of practice, situated elderliness, design.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2. User centered design
Background, theme and relevance
Designing for elderly is a growing field of research and practice [5], but experiences with welfare technologies and service design, oriented towards this group indicate that there are significant gaps between the inscriptions of the elderly in welfare technologies and services and the elderly’s own perspectives on aging [2]. This observation points towards interesting methodological design challenges for this area.
The workshop is based on the organizers’ experiences in co-designing with elderly. When entering the area of designing for and with elderly we did not know that recruiting seniors already in the initial steps should prove to be so complicated. In a recent research project we wanted to expose a vivid senior culture spanning the 55 year old just getting to the point of considering, that she is in the second part of life, and the 90 year old at an elderly care home, realizing that life is coming to an end. We may have started out naively assuming that our elderly co-designers were already there ready to embark on our project journey. But constructing who are to be considered as future users is part of the effort. During the initial visits to social clubs, elderly homes and community centers “We are not …” seem to be much more the statement than “ Yes we are…”. Our research project was based on a particular and norm based definition of being elderly that were much too simplified and stereotype. Rather than using biological age, institutional categories or similar formal ways to group the people that we imagine as the future users of our design concepts, we suggest therefore 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 the communities of practice that defines these contexts.
By situated elderlinesswe refer to practices that include activities that has become challenging or perhaps even impossible to carry out by him- or herself. For example when the public tax assessment notice is transformed from being paper based to being web based. A consequence of changing the tax assessment notice suddenly creates a large group of people considered old as they are not able to handle their tax assessment notice themselves due to lack of experience using the Internet. In these situations in a contextual sense they practice situated elderliness, but simultaneously they might be able to handle all other situations in their everyday life.
The notion of communities of practice was originally developed in the field of work practices to capture the skills and competencies enacted by people engaged in a professional practice. Lave and Wenger coined the concept of communities of practice [3] in this way: “In using the term community, we do not imply some primordial culture-sharing entity. We assume that members have different interests, make diverse contributions to activity, and hold varied viewpoints. In our view, participation at multiple levels is entailed in membership in a community of practice. Nor does the term community imply necessarily co-presence, a well-defined, identifiable group, or socially visible boundaries. It does imply participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities” [3, p 97-98].
According to [4], a community of practice is “a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on their common interests. One might think of a community of practice as a group of people playing in a field defined by the domain of skills and techniques over which the members of the group interact. Being in the field provides members with a sense of identity – both in the individual sense and in a contextual sense, that is, how the individual relates to the community as a whole” [4]. This conceptualization leads us to talk about communities of everyday practice, where elderly are skillfully enacting everyday practices.
When reflecting on our former processes of recruiting and engaging elderly participants we suggest inviting groups of people sharing some kind of everyday practices as a methodological starting point for co-designing with elderly [1].
Aim and outcomes
The aim of the workshop is to identify methodological challenges when co-designing in mundane environments with groups of people who are not defined as a group by any formal rules or regulations but rather by the nature of their everyday life.
Proposed workshop format and activities
We propose a full day workshop. Morning session is devoted to an introduction to the workshop and presentation of participants’ experiences in the field. First part of the afternoon will be divided into thematic discussions based on the presented challenges and themes. The workshop output will be summarized in either a poster or a draft idea for a shared paper, depending on the nature of the submissions and discussions.
We imagine 15-30 participants. Everybody are asked to submit a 2-4 page position paper outlining their experience in the field, contribution, and future aims, i.e. why the workshop would be relevant for their current or future research or practice. Participants are expected to engage in discussions and present experiences, observations, methodological reflections and theoretical contribution to ensure an interesting workshop.
Position papers must be sent to malmborg@itu.dk and tbi@kadk.dk before August 20, 2012.
Participation
We welcome both researchers and practitioners to participate in the workshop.
Organizers
Thomas Binder and Eva Brandt are associate professors at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, School of Design, Copenhagen.
Lone Malmborg is an associate professor at The IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The organizers all have several years of experience in designing and doing research in the field of elderly. They are currently involved in two design oriented research projects in the area of elderly; SeniorInteraktion[1] and LevVel Mødestedet[2].
Workshop website
A website for the workshop will be available at https://elderlyeveryday.wordpress.com.
Needed facilities
We will need a spacy room allowing for splitting up discussions in smaller groups (or two adjacent rooms)
References
[1] Brandt, E., Binder, T. and Malmborg, L. Communities of everyday practice and situated elderliness as an approach to co-design for senior interaction. OZCHI 2010, November 22-26, (2010), Brisbane, Australia.
[2] Ertner, M., Malmborg, L. Lost in Translation: Inscriptions of the Elderly in Concept-Driven Design of Welfare Technology. Position paper presented at CHI2012, May 5-10, (2012), Austin, TX, USA
[3] Lave, J. and Wenger, E. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, NY, USA (1991)
[4] Lesser, E. L. and Storck, J. Communities of Practice and Organizational Performance. IBM Systems Journal, Vol.40, No. 4 (2001). Available online: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.html (2005)
[5] Riche, Y., and Mackay, W. PeerCare: Supporting Awareness of Rhythms and Routines for Better Aging in Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2010) 19:73 – 104. DOI 10.1007/s10606-009-9105-z. Springer.
[6] Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press, NY, USA. 1998
Elderly’s everyday practices 