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

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 55and 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.