In April 2010 four REAL play workshops on the concept of Lego were held, starting off in Copenhagen, followed by Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland.

The workshops gave a deeper understanding of what challenges seniors and elderly people face in social relations, how they create new relations and what barriers  seniors are faced with when overcoming loneliness. The findings from the four workshops were used as a way of narrowing down how to outline the research guide for the ethnographic study.

An important guideline that was underlined in the workshops is that chronological age is not an interesting marker, as elderly people are just as individually different from one another as young people. Retirement has therefore become an important marker in the E2C, because retirement has a certain overall impact on one’s everyday life in combination with how you deal with greater upheavals, such as the loss of a loved one, long term (or terminal) illness or the change of living environment.

In the beginning of May 2010, research guides were sent out and all four countries were ready to recruit informants to interview for the ethnographic study. Five informants were recruited from each country, and data collection was finished by the end of May 2010. The first analysis of the ethnographic study was presented at an internal workshop on June 22nd in Helsinki, Finland. The first draft of the prototypes will be made in the autumn of 2010.