Inspired by concepts from the Participatory Design discourse such as the idea of design process as Things and the concept of agonistic democracy, the authors have engaged a community of over 7000 retired academics who are actively ageing on their university campus in China through a variety of methods since 2011. In this this a reflexive ethnographic study with these intelligent older people the study focuses on how they designed their lives, the “Ingenuity of Ageing”. A research team composed of design researchers and a sociologist investigated how designers facilitate infrastructure and the mobilization of participation in design. From their intensive interaction with this group, the authors found important new roles for designers as triggers/ activists. Regarding the ways of deliberating people’s value in design processes, they employed Ricoeur’s ideas of utopia and ideology as the key concept guiding the design of their on-going experiment, the Scientist Study. This study engages a community of retired scientists who are actively exploring possibilities in their retirement, on their university campus in China. After building trust based on a one-year engagement process, the authors revisited the situation to refine how participation should work with the critical task of designers, i.e. transfer people’s ingenuity towards insights for democratic innovation may improve lives for our future selves. [Adapted from the authors’abstract].
Lee, Yanki; Ho, Denny and Albert Tsang (2013) Design for the Ingenuity of Ageing : new role of designers in democratic innovation (Paper presented at the international conference Social Frontiers : The next edge of social innovation research, at GCU's London Campus on 14th and 15th November 2013).
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