Tangible Memories and Tangible Memories: Parlours of Wonder
Years active: 2015-2018
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
The Tangible Memories project was initially a 22 month interdisciplinary and cross sectoral team project. The project team included social scientists, a charity working in care homes, care home managers, care home residents, families, computer scientists, artists, designers and historians.
Our interest was in the cultural/social potential of new, future facing tools and technologies to support older adults to share stories, curate and represent their lives. Our methods involved working alongside care home residents and care staff to co-design a series of technological prototypes to support democratic community building in care homes.
We conducted ‘a day in the life of ethnographies’ in our 3 settings, interviewed care managers, conducted in depth narrative interviews with 10 residents, utilised design probes and artefacts, ran multisensory storytelling sessions and used music to encourage story telling. Prototypes co-designed included an interactive rocking chair, TopoTiles to encourage place based story telling and our StoryCreator book making app. We found that harnessing the power of innovative technologies and evocative objects in care settings can impact directly on relationships of care, on intra-generational relationships between residents themselves and on intergenerational relationships between residents and their families and friends.
On completion of the original project we successfully applied for a follow on funded impact and engagement project called Parlours of Wonder. Specific aims of this project included co-designing an engaging community focused space in 3 different settings where older people and others can interact with evocative objects, using our StoryCreator app together to record and share their ideas, memories and stories.
During the project we co-designed a DIY blueprint to enable other care settings to design their own Parlour of Wonder, developed and ran a series of community facing, multigenerational activities in the Parlour, co-designed a training toolkit for care staff and co-curated an exhibition.
Principal investigator
- Helen Manchester
Co-researchers
- Ki Cater
- Tim Cole