Prof Catharine Ward Thompson
OPENspace research centre, University of Edinburgh
September 2013 to January 2017
AIM: Mobility, Mood and Place (MMP) explores how places can be designed collaboratively to make pedestrian mobility easy, enjoyable and meaningful for older people.
Objectives:
- To bring together researchers, designers-in-training and older participants to envision places, from homes to public spaces, which are inclusive, enabling and inspirational.
- To explore emotional dimensions of place, and better understand how setting impacts on behaviour, using mobile neural imaging methods and walking interviews.
- To investigate how physical, built and social environments evolve over time, and how they impact on inequalities in health-related mobility as people move into older age, using lifecourse data from the Lothian Birth Cohort.
Main project outcomes:
- Guidelines, design exemplars for age-friendly environments and potential tool for evaluating environmental design interventions.
- Identified ‘affective’ dimensions of places.
- Exemplary processes for co-designing with older people.
- Methodology for understanding negative and positive emotive ‘hot spots’ in the environment that affect older people’s mobility.
- Environmental indicators of healthy and mobile lifestyles in older age.
- Identification of environmental factors that are important at different life stages in relation to mobility and health in older age.