Book 3: Introducing Blaise Weston Court

Objects for Reminiscence

We have begun to co-design our third interactive book with another resident at Blaise Weston Court. When we approached the Tangible Memories group about the book project and showed them our first one, The Eye of the Hare, one man came up with an interesting suggestion. Rather than making a book about his life and memories, he said he would like to create a book about Blaise Weston Court. With so many terrible stories of cruelty and neglect in care homes featured in the news recently, he wanted to document one of the success stories and celebrate the place where he lives.

In our first session, he talked about his idea for the book, how he came to live at Blaise Weston Court and his impressions of how care for the elderly has changed over the decades. For our second session, he wrote up those ideas in two documents, which we are working with to include in the book.

We are co-designing a format to test for his book, which draws on the work we have done so far with books one and two. He is happy for the book to be introduced by him, but in order to give a good overview of Blaise Weston Court we are all in favour of involving a number of different voices including other residents and possibly staff members. For each person, we want to have a photo and short profile followed by the results of a creative activity, which we will do with them in one-hour sessions. We have come up a selection of activities, which include a range of ideas to allow for the varied abilities, interests and memories that exist at Blaise Weston Court.

Co-designing and testing the activities with other residents, will help us to further develop our blueprint.

 

Book 2 – progress report

Objects for Reminiscence

We are in the process of creating our second interactive book, this time with one of the residents at Blaise Weston Court. It will be a collection of memories, photos and stories from her life. As before, the finished book will contain AR triggers, which allow you to listen to her recalling memories of her mother, the music she loved during the war, and lots of other audio clips and films to add depth to the text and images.

We have been visiting for the past six weeks to build up material that will make up her book. Each session has had a particular focus, such as food, music or clothing. From our conversations each week we have compiled a series of pages, taking text from things she has written and transcriptions of her words to show snippets and memories from her life.

The next stage will be to work with her to decide on which order she wants the pages. As with our first book, The Eye of the Hare, we are interested in juxtaposing memories from different times in her life, rather than displaying them in chronological order, to reflect the fragmented nature of memory. This process of ordering will also allow her to highlight any gaps or significant events/times that she would like to include.

Co-designing is helping us to develop a blueprint of tasks that we hope eventually can be followed by other older people and their carers/relatives who want to create their own books.

We were also pleased today when she said how much she was enjoying the process. She said it has helped her to remember all kinds of things that were buried, going right back to her childhood.

This is a photo of her that she sent to her husband in 1944, when he was stationed in Holland during WWII.

 

 

Making Memories

News, Objects of Exchange, Projects

The chance to work closely with artist and art workshop leader, Deborah Feiler, from Alive! Activities was a great opportunity to learn more about the potential of creative processes to elicit memories and personal stories from residents in a care home setting.

Starting with a series of three workshop sessions, Deborah and I were helpfully given a research question to frame our creative explorations with the residents: Can older people make objects which are meaningful to them? Some other questions we also hoped to consider included: Does a story have to be told with words? Can art express a memory? Can a collection of objects work together to express a memory? How can the creative process contribute to a better understanding of the individual, in a care home setting?

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Exploring identity through objects and images

News, Objects of Exchange, Projects

At a recent conference, I was intrigued to hear about a form entitled This Is Me, which aims to ‘help health and social care professionals build a better understanding of who the person really is’, when a person is suffering from dementia and about to enter a new care home. I decided to download a copy from the Alzheimer’s Society’s website, and try responding to it myself:

This is Me form edited

It was very difficult to summarise my identity and life history in four lines or less and I am only 38. I can only imagine how much more challenging and upsetting this task becomes when you are over 70, 80 or 90 years old, and are perhaps struggling to recall some of the more significant moments or events. Personally, even for me, it was a strangely emotive experience to try and reduce myself to a sentence or two, or a list of points at best. I felt frustrated and humiliated that a single piece of paper should represent the complexity of any human being, and be handed over to care staff with the title of the form declaring ‘This Is Me’. This is not me – I am not a printed sheet of A4. I was also at a loss to know how I should respond (despite the lengthy Guidance Notes provided) to such open-ended statements like ‘I would like you to know…’ (4 lines) and worried about providing the ‘correct’ information under each section. The idea of completing this form, even with a trusted friend or family member to assist, must be very distressing for new residents on the move at a confusing and challenging stage of life.

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Virtual Reality Storytelling

Nature, Technology and Well-Being, News, Objects of Escape, Projects

We played around with using the Oculus Rift today as a means for creating a virtual space for storytelling. Our first two testers M & B both enjoyed the experience. We firstly tried out stepping into a 3D snapshot of the Bristol Museum Foyer, and then took a trip up Cabot Tower. M had a look around a virtual Tuscan Villa whilst B opted for a whistle-stop tour of the Solar System. The next step is to customise the virtual scenes and introduce the possibility of handling objects relevant to the scene during the experience. An interesting finding was that binaural audio recordings played at the same time proved to be a distraction from the visual material.

VR-M Continue reading →

Making Our First Book

Making, News, Objects for Reminiscence, Projects

We had never made a print on demand book before, so wanted to test it out before we start working with people in the care homes to create their own reminiscence books.

Barney and I are brother and sister, but we also work regularly with other members of our family, including our parents, Pip and Ali Heywood. We developed a show with our Dad Pip last year, called The Eye of the Hare, which is an autobiographical piece about aspects of his life. It’s a one-man show with him on stage reading extracts and stories from a book he has been writing combined with film and audio clips.

As we have all the material and multimedia for The Eye of the Hare already, we decided to use that to create our initial prototype book. So, the three of us got together with the script and media from the show and tried to figure out how to turn it into an interactive book. Continue reading →

Making, News, Objects containing Stories, Projects

Interactive Musical Quilt

Image

Earlier this week I tried out sewing small RFID buttons into (and onto) a test fabric quilt. The aim is to create a musical blanket that can be used for storytelling. The ‘electronic cup’ shown on the right can read the tags and play preassigned passages of music when you hover over one of the buttons.

RFID Quilt Test