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Flex was designed to work with people
between the ages of 40 and 65,
to look at how they might plan for a convivial life as they age.
So we're looking at the whole lifespan,
but starting at the point where people are starting
to first think about what happens as they get older.
And rather than looking at it in terms of assistive living
and how they might make themselves comfortable
with physical infirmity,
we're looking at what would actually keep them connected
as people become more socially isolated.
and there's evidence that that increases as you get older,
because perhaps mobility goes down,
and also there's a tendency for families to move away
things become more separate.
So how can you decrease that separation?
What can you do? How can you
design in a convivial life as you age?
There's an increasingly ageing population.
They need to stay in their own homes,
partly because it's nicer to do so,
partly because the care bill will be astronomical.
But there's a lot of work in assistive technology
that helps people to live independently from care.
But independent living isn't necessarily convivial living.
It isolates people further.
So how do we encourage people to connect?
Or how do people go out and rediscover
what it is in a community that makes them connect?
We incorporated design in a number of ways in this project.
One, is how we think about our environment,
which is heavily designed.
One question was how much would people redesign
their material environment, and change the bricks and mortar
so that they were more convivial?
We found that people weren't very interested in that aspect.
So how would you design social process
so that people are more engaged?
What intervention could you design
which connect people together?
So there might be sharing technologies
that could be designed, or processes where people decide
they're going to walk their dogs together,
and little interventions like that.
We were asking people how they'd made
their own decisions in those spaces
and things that they would like to share.
Almost like recipes,
which are in effect design interventions.
So that was one area.
The other side was very much in terms of method,
because we didn't want to just plonk
a load of people together and give them a questionnaire.
So how were we going to bring people together
so that they would actually interact warmly
and convivially themselves?
So we targeted a group who were between 40,
and we thought about 65,
we ended up to about 80.
It was a really diverse group,
from social housing, from rental housing,
people who owned their own homes,
single parents, retirees -- a really diverse group.
When we brought them together, we thought we need to
do this in a way that allows for some joy,
if we're going to talk about those kinds of aspects.
So we brought them together over a tea party.
And how we designed the questions,
and how the questions were part of the tea party,
it was very much also a kind of design.
A number of disciplines are involved in such a project.
We're working with an interior design specialist.
We've got a community partner who work in architecture
but they looked particularly at how ordinary people
can engage in architectural practice
and think about the spaces and buildings around them.
My background is design, but it's also performance
and looking at how people engage with each other.
So that's the core that come together in the project.
We also brought in a series of experts,
we brought in architecture experts, we brought in people whose background
is how people can age comfortably.
Some of that was about assistive living,
but also about the things that might be useful
to keep people feeling socially engaged.
We all have a commitment to being participatory.
It's not that we want to tell older people what to do,
we want older people to be thinking about what it is
they want to do, and to share that with us.
The way that we engaged the community groups,
and this is where it is so useful
to have a very well-connected partner involved,
was to use the networks that Northern Architecture already has.
They know a number of social housing organisations.
They know a lot of people who are interested in this work.
We asked to have people who will be interested
in coming to a tea party to talk about future living?
I've learnt rich and diverse things;
one thing has been about the simple joy
of working with other people who have a similar interest.
I've been working with Andy Milligan at the University of Dundee
and with Lowry and Carol at Northern Architecture.
And I think the issues we care about are very similar,
but the way that we approach them is quite diverse.
That's been a richness to my practice as a researcher.
I also like to play with the way that people engage,
and we were using a café after hours
in which to do these exchanges
around the idea of convivial ageing,
and so we were booking spaces
that I've never worked in before.
Instead of the clinical, white environment
that a lot of interactions happen when you're doing research,
we were able to take it into a very charming space,
decorate it, put candles on the table,
put scones and sandwiches out
with questions that were hidden in the food.
So that instead of having to dictate an order
to peoples' enquiry, things were just emerging;
they were having a look, it was relaxed,
they were able to talk to each other.
So this real diverse mixture of people came together
in a way that was quite open, warm
and that was a really nice development
of how you plan exchanges.
If you're interested in working on a connected communities project,
one of the things I would suggest is that
you find a community partner that you can work with.
Go and talk to them, find out what their priorities are,
work out what would motivate them to be involved.
Then think about how you cost in their time,
but also something that's of more value to them than that,
which will actually promote their organisation
or something which they would like to see developed.
Bring that together and work together to develop it.
So it may well be that you do the writing,
but that you're writing down something
that is a genuine joint proposal.
We're still wrapping the project up,
but we've already worked out
what several outcomes are going to be.
Obviously there are academics involved
and we would like to write papers
to share it in the academic community,
we're also interested in working with smaller organisations
and community partners of other kinds.
We're distilling our findings about sharing and convivial living
into a series of recipes,
which we want to put into a centre-spread of a newsletter,
as a series of placemats that can also then be used
as the centre point of an exhibition that we're running in Dundee. �