Abstract
Mobility, Mood and Place explores how places can be designed collaboratively to make pedestrian mobility easy, enjoyable and meaningful for older people. The built environment often excludes marginalised groups such as older people, single mothers and others with special needs. ‘Co-design’ is emerging as an important approach in architectural and urban design, which diversifies stakeholder participation and representation. Participatory co-design approaches can include such stakeholders so as to address their priorities and ensure that other stakeholders empathise with their perspective. This can enhance students’ methodological flexibility and empathy. This paper critically reflects on architecture students’ experiences, together with older adults (including stroke-survivors and those with dementia), in producing co-design research on age-friendly environments and offers some methodological insights. It also discusses competing objectives between a co-design research project that involved students of architecture and landscape design on post-graduate academic programmes. Finally, the paper will offer contributions to architects interested in designing places that take into account the needs of older people.
Highlights
All academic studio design projects are subject to forces generated by people and critical apparatus that pull the project and its envisaged destination in different directions
Standard note on funding for MMP Research project. Dementia and those who had suffered a stroke, through a series of co-design workshops that formed part of a trio of architectural design studios over a three-year period. (This paper focusses on years 1 and 2 of Work Package 1.) Data generated from these workshops and other participatory methods employed were utilised by students of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to generate proposals for age-friendly environments
The objective was to create a clear alignment between project detail design and MMP research engagements at the more intimate scales so that in considering detailed issues of structure, materiality and environment, students would consider age-friendly affordance in relation to those concerns
Summary
All academic studio design projects are subject to forces generated by people and critical apparatus that pull the project and its envisaged destination in different directions. One strand of live participation, ‘Co-design’, is emerging as an important approach in architectural and urban design that diversifies stakeholder participation and representation (Cruickshank et al 2013). This engagement introduces another competing force into. Some key methodological insights will be discussed here along with a critical analysis of design products produced by students that operated at a series of scales and add to our knowledge of what makes places more psychologically and physically enabling for older people
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