The Tangible Memories team have been busy over the summer consolidating our learning so far. This has involved writing papers, attending conferences and continuing to think about and work on our co-design process with older people. We’re about to begin an exciting phase of turning prototypes into working designs as well as developing our ideas for our end of project conference to be held in Bristol on February 25th and 26th, 2015.

The team have presented at the British Society of Gerontology conference in Southampton where we ran a symposium in which all members of the team  presented their views on the first year of the project.

Seana and Helen presented their paper, ‘Is that Thing Still on?: Storytelling, the Stuff of creativity and the curation of self in everyday life among elderly extra care home residents in Bristol’ at the Oxford Ethnography and Education.

Pete and Ki have been working on two papers for computer science/ HCI conferences including CHI2015.

Our wonderful artists meanwhile have been involved in some exciting other work including Stand + Stare’s fabulous project with Knowle West Media Centre ‘I will always have you’ and Heidi Hinder’s brilliant ‘Money is no Object‘ at the V & A.

Alive! activities have also been busy over the summer – commissioning an evaluation of their work and taking on new members of staff as they expand. They were also shortlisted for the Tech for Good awards in the category of Digital Health.

So the team are now looking forward to showing our installation at the Bristol Celebrating Age Festival on September 27th at the MShed and to our Autumn tea parties to be held in all our partner care homes in October.  Also look out for our public event as part of the ESRC Thinking futures Festival entitled, ‘Care homes of the Future’ – further details to follow shortly.