A collaborative research project between Falmouth University and Miners Court
The Future Thinking for Social Living project took place in May and June 2015 at Miners Court, an assisted care housing complex managed by Coastline Housing in Redruth, Cornwall. A short pilot study, TRSL was led by researchers at Falmouth University and FoAM Kernow, with support from Arts for Health Cornwall, who worked with residents to explore how co-creation methods might help increase agency and wellbeing within the Miners Court community.
Miners Court houses over 60 residents who occupy their own individual flats and have access to a number of communal spaces and facilities, including a dining room, garden, hairdressers, a pool table, lounge and various spaces for activities. The project began when Miners Court management invited researchers to explore ways of invigorating the communal spaces, which it felt weren’t being used to their full potential. The project team decided to work with crafts and arts practices and devised the idea of a pop up research studio that would operate in various locations thoughout the building, and which residents could join if and when they pleased. The aim was to use co-creation, creative making and design fiction (a technique used by designers to envisage the future) approaches, to help participants re-envisage their environment by exploring the relationship between creativity, space, identity, social connectivity and emotional health and wellbeing.
As such, FTSL is an emerging method that combines hand-making and digital technologies to encourage active participation, which is specific and situated within a particular context and community. The project mixed together digital and analogue tools, craft practices and creative making. It employed Do-It-Yourself and Do-It-With-Others ethos’, paying attention to chance conversations and new narratives. It uses creative practices to establish safe spaces in which people can reflect, be quiet and listen, by noisy, talk, joke, have fun, challenge themselves and each other, and find ways to engage together and potentially engage with others.
The project started with an overarching question of what home is and what makes a home. The project album documents the moments of making and talking, sharing and reflecting and showcases what participants made during the course of the nine days we were together.