How do we build connections in increasingly ageing communities? How do we get better at sharing personal stories and oral histories in ways that build community as well as creating new academic insights? How can we harness the evocative power of lifelong objects and the communicative and archiving potential of digital technologies? The UK population is ageing with the fastest population increases in the numbers of those aged 85 and over. It is projected that by 2035 those aged 65 and over will account for 23% of the total population whilst the number of people aged 85 and over will reach 3.5 million accounting for 5 per cent of the total UK population. These changes have wide ranging implications for our communities, our family relationships, the institutions that are important to us, and concerns related to health and well-being and social trust and isolation. The care home market is growing exponentially creating new communities of circumstance of older people coming together from diverse backgrounds and with unique experiences. Pressing questions arise about how we might create 'community' in these settings and what role oral/life history collection and sharing might play in this process. Our technical development process will involve our interdisciplinary team working with older people to co-design a desirable interface where familiar objects themselves control the interaction. We will augment the objects by associating the oral history digitally to the object. The interface will be designed such that it will be possible for older people, in conversation with their families and/or care home workers, to 'self' curate and input their own stories with minimal interaction with the technology. The look and feel of the interface, as well as its functionality, will be co-produced with older people following an approach based on user-centric, rapid prototyping in collaboration with artists and computer scientists. In the move to a care home lifelong objects may sometimes get lost or misplaced, given away or sold. We will work with an artist-maker experienced in designing beautiful tangible objects to produce a range of 3D 'proxies' for the objects based on categorisations developed in the early stages of the research and design process. Through ownership of the physical augmented object, each individual will have tangible control over who is able to access their memory; whether they want to keep hold of the augmented object for personal use or whether they are willing to share their object with family, friends or others in their care home or beyond it. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team including social historians, digital artists and makers, learning researchers, computer scientists, older people themselves and registered therapists we will co-produce a set of new digital tools that will address some of the key societal challenges concerning the care and well-being of older people and the legacy of the memories and stories that they leave for future generations. We are interested in exploring the way that smart objects and the internet of things might be developed in both historical research and in democratic community building.

The populations of Europe are rapidly ageing. Due to economic development, advances in healthcare and medicine and improved lifestyle, we have experienced a continuous increase in life expectancy during the last century. One of the consequences is a growing need for caregivers in eldercare. At the same time, the European countries are getting more multicultural and in many workplaces, the elder care staff no longer constitutes an ethnic homogeneous group but consists of employees with widely different cultural backgrounds and different norms and values. This creates challenges within a discipline where values, attitudes and communication are very important to the work environment: In nursing and caring, the staff gets very close to the person in need of care, breaking through his or her personal barriers and entering the intimate sphere. Differences in attitudes and approaches to elder care among colleagues with different ethnic backgrounds often give rise to misunderstandings and irritation in everyday life, sometimes even growing to dissociation and isolation of specific groups of staff. The European countries are lacking tools to improve elder care employees' ability to manage multicultural workplaces and the aim of this project was to contribute to strengthening of the competences of employees in the eldercare sector in managing value systems based on different cultural backgrounds. Both with regard to inter-collegial communication and teamwork and with regard to the communication skills of the nursing staff in their contact with their clients. Objectives:More experience in collaboration between education and employmentCaregivers have achieved new key competences regarding their understanding of different value systems and cultural backgroundsCaregivers have learned new methods to support their future opportunities for further training in acquisition of new key competences, including ICT competencesNew teaching methods to support improvements in formal and informal vocational education are developed with employees as co-developersA strengthened development within the care sector that rely on a broad European basis in relation to differences in cultural, organizational, economic and technological frameworkDevelopment within the care sector's vocational training is facilitated through the transfer of knowledge and experience from other sectorsInteraction between vocational training and learning in practice in different national contexts are improved The partnership consisted of 9 partners: From each of the countries Denmark, Italy, Germany and UK, a care organization and an educational institution participated. Besides, a Danish union representing elder care employees (the coordinating partner of the project). The partners brought into the project their experiences from care giving, training/education of caregivers, working as a union for caregivers, decision making in the field and general experience from work with multiculturality issues and dissemination. Professor Dominique Bouchet from the Department of Marketing and Management at the University of Southern Denmark was subcontracted as an expert. He has done research in cultural differences in workplaces and the training material he has developed in this field, served as inspiration for the partners in the development of their own training material targeting specifically the care sector. The project partners developed in each of their countries training programs and training materials that were tested three times. In the periods between the training sessions, materials and programs were evaluated, adjusted and further developed. There was a mutual understanding among the partners, that training must be rooted in everyday practice to achieve maximum impact so the evaluation also included an assessment of this aspect. Working places and educational institutions cooperated closely in the development of the training. Managements and team leaders of care organizations were involved in the recruitment of staff for the activities and were consulted on how to ensure the sustainability of the results of the project. The development of the training programs in each country had a common transnational starting point, there was mutual inspiration and a high degree of synergy effect. However, the training courses ended up very differently in each country as a result of the different national contexts. We consider this as one of the strengths of this project: The products can actually be used now and in the nearest future because they meet concrete and relevant needs in each country and on top of that, they offer more than courses produced isolated in one country without benefit from cooperation with other nationalities. This is probably why not only the educational institutions and the care organizations that were the project partners but also those to whom we have disseminated information, right now are integrating the results in their activities.