Tangible Memories: Community in Care

我们如何在日益老龄化的社区建立联系？我们如何更好地分享个人故事和口述历史，建立社区，以及创造新的学术见解？我们如何利用终身对象的唤起力量以及数字技术的通信和存档潜力？英国人口正在老龄化，85岁及以上人口增长最快。预计到2035年，65岁及以上的人口将占总人口的23%，而85岁及以上的人口将达到350万，占英国总人口的5%。这些变化对我们的社区、家庭关系、对我们很重要的机构以及与健康和福祉、社会信任和孤立有关的问题产生了广泛的影响。养老院市场正在呈指数级增长，创造了来自不同背景和独特经历的老年人的新社区。迫切的问题是，我们如何在这些环境中创建“社区”，以及口述/生活史收集和分享在这一过程中可能发挥什么作用。我们的技术开发过程将涉及我们的跨学科团队与老年人合作，共同设计一个理想的界面，熟悉的对象本身控制交互。我们将通过将口述历史数字化地与对象相关联来增强对象。该界面的设计将使老年人在与家人和/或养老院工作人员交谈时，能够“自我”策划和输入自己的故事，而只需最少的与技术的互动。界面的外观和感觉，以及它的功能，将与老年人共同制作，遵循以用户为中心的方法，与艺术家和计算机科学家合作快速原型。在搬到养老院的过程中，终身物品有时可能会丢失或放错地方，赠送或出售。我们将与一位在设计美丽的有形物体方面经验丰富的艺术家合作，根据研究和设计过程早期阶段开发的分类为物体制作一系列3D“代理”。通过物理增强对象的所有权，每个人将对谁能够访问他们的记忆具有有形的控制权;无论他们是想保持个人使用的增强对象，还是他们愿意与家人，朋友或其他人分享他们的对象在他们的护理之家或以外。汇集了一个跨学科的团队，包括社会历史学家，数字艺术家和制造商，学习研究人员，我们将与计算机科学家、老年人本人和注册治疗师共同制作一套新的数字化工具，以应对有关老年人的护理和福祉以及他们留给后代的记忆和故事的一些关键社会挑战。我们有兴趣探索智能物体和物联网在历史研究和民主社区建设中的发展方式。

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.