Tangible Memories: Community in Care

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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.