Enabling Ongoingness.

Abstract

The project is a design engagement with older people, people living with dementia, people approaching the end of their lives and people who are bereaved.

One aim of the project is to find new ways to capture and represent something meaningful about an individual and their relationships through a combination of physical things and digital media (which could mean photographs, music, film clips etc). We hope to better understand the potential benefits that design and digital technologies can bring to people to offer new ways to: (i) Express a sense of who they are in the present, but also for the future; (ii) Make objects and media content that will support other people after one’s death; (iii) Enable people, who are already bereaved, to maintain lasting bonds in new ways with someone who has now died.

The project is called Enabling Ongoingness because the term ongoingness suggests that our relationships with each other, especially the most personally meaningful of these, do not end if someone dies. For many people there is continuity and something that lasts that can be of great comfort and inner support for people when they are bereaved. Rather than thinking of endings, we are championing continued bonds between people in this project and hope to support these for participants and to enable people to think of things that we could all make together not only for now, but also for the future.

Project Details

Date:

Jun 2017 – Sept 2020

Funding:

EPSRC

Funded value:

£869964.64

Project website

https://ongoingness.cargocollective.com/
and https://enablingongoingness.com/

Collaborators

• Jayne Wallace (Principal Investigator), Northumbria University
• Shaun Lawson, Northumbria University
• Claire Craig, Sheffield Hallam University
• Kellie Morrisey, Newcastle University
• Kyle Montague, Newcastle University
• Extended team includes:
• Trevor Duncan, Nantia Koulidou, Julie Trueman, Jamie Mahoney (Northumbria University) and Helen Fisher (Sheffield Hallam)