How can we age positively?

We want to challenge who uses creative community workspaces like QWS. Typically, these spaces are targeted at young professionals. But why not older generations? Just because one is retired doesn’t mean their life stops. After retirement, it can be hard to meet people too, but at the same time meeting new people and having new passions is important for aging positively. We want to learn the stories of the older communities within Shibuya. Then help to build up the community members’ creative confidence and ultimately co-create a project that will strengthen the social fabric of all of Shibuya.

A pitfall of retirement is the loss of social networks. The people you saw everyday, you see more rarely. Even joining micro-communities, like sports clubs can help to create some social ties, but membership of such communities can be every changing making it hard to build strong networks. We believe that if we can work with members of these micro-communities we can help to create new ways to strengthen member ties so that they expand beyond just one small group.

Planning
-interviewing & inviting members of the community into the QWS space (introducing them to the creative environment)
-collecting stories then analyzing these stories for key words/points of interest before reshaping them to be used in workshop phase

Action
-Phase 1: Building creative confident workshops
-Phase 2: Co-creating solutions workshops

Summary
-Analyze the workshop outcomes
　-What was produced?
　-What were the findings from the “Action” step?

The hidden value of personal stories that are only created after living for over 60 decades. I believe that the current older generations have skills/ideas/personal histories that can inspire/aid/develop new ideas in younger generations but there is a gap that is preventing this from happening. Our older generations still have so much to offer but for the most part, society makes it difficult for many of their voices to be heard.

For my masters’ thesis, I worked with older adults in long-term care facilities and created multi-modal memory books. The purpose of the books was to give people of varying abilities a tool by which they could interact. The multi-modal system of the book allowed users to engage with the book’s content using various senses. The content of the books was developed through interviews with older adults and was a collection of various personal stories. It is from this experience that I saw the effects personal stories can have on the relationships within a small community. I also learned how important it can be to share the stories of older adults as the empathy created through understanding can help to strengthen their social network. And with so many older adults now living and dying alone it is important to strengthen their ties to the community as a whole so that no one feels forgotten or lonely.