Helen Manchester: Tangible Memories: Community in care through storytelling.

The digital transformations of the last few decades are leaving behind many older adults who, for reasons ranging from accessibility issues to work biographies to personal preference, are less likely to engage with digital technologies.

At the same time discourse and practice around the design of technologies foregrounds the biological over the personal, social and cultural needs of older people, tending to highlight aspects of surveillance and the need for physically ‘assistive’ technologies.

The interdisciplinary Tangible Memories: Community in Care project, which worked with computer scientists, artists and historians, adopted a different approach - designing technologies to support the personal and social lives of older adults. The project explored the potential of tangible user interfaces to enable storytelling - making sense of and sharing stories of lives lived - to increase ‘community’ in care home settings.