Our population is ageing. Older people are more likely to live alone and have poor health. This is a recipe for isolation and loneliness; a growing problem as evidenced by the agenda of the ESRC/UKRI's Healthy Ageing Challenge and the UN's Decade of Healthy Ageing. COVID has exacerbated the situation; older people are frequently reporting feeling anxious about leaving the house. This shrinking world creates barriers to engaging with arts and culture. Yet, we know that having a rich cultural life promotes wellbeing and brings increased confidence and opportunities for social connection. Tabletop Travels addresses isolation and disconnection by offering a fun and stimulating travel experience from home. It engages all the senses to bring alive the culture, history and heritage of a selection of European destinations. The experience is delivered bi-monthly in a recyclable gift box which contains place-based objects, images, words, tastes, smells, sounds and stories, curated by an artist who lives and works in the destination. Tabletop Travels offers immediate excitement -the anticipation of the delivery, connection with the gift-giver, trying drinks and snacks. But there is also longer-lasting interest through the use of multimedia accessed through QR codes, which offer an in-depth view of local lives. Tabletop Travels is an alternative to television, social media or puzzle compendia, offering three-dimensional cultural exploration that can be enjoyed alone or with friends, relatives or carers. The experience alleviates isolation through pleasure and intellectual stimulation but it also supports enhanced digital skills which can open up more of the world, and social connection; new topics for conversation and a sense of togetherness. This experience is rooted in lived experience - the original idea came from Jeanne Ellin who identifies as 'housebound', and in research, as the idea was then developed as part of the three-year ESRC-funded project Connecting Through Culture As We Age (CTCAWA). The first iteration of the product was based on an immersive dining experience but was not commercially viable. This new postal/digital offer was further co-designed with potential users to still be exciting but also scalable and affordable. It appeas to multiple potential market users from cross-generational gift-giving to charities to social care providers and corporates. We are developing briefs for the curation of box contents, including a booklet, and by August 2024 we will have a website, logos and branding and samples of an Athens box. Our next steps are to develop partnerships with philanthropic and commercial organisations, explore potential sponsorship, produce a marketing campaign, build a market and work on distribution. We also want to recruit 'micro-curators' to get boxes production-ready, and the co-design team will continue to refine the product. A charity partner is already interested in taking on Tabletop Travels as a trading arm, if we can demonstrate commercial viability. Tabletop Travels fits with their aims and values and profits would support a range of their work with isolated adults.

As we grow older, we need to keep growing our intellectual, social, cultural and professional aspirations to produce something of value for us and for others. Research suggests that as we age, retaining and growing these creative capabilities is fundamental for our health and wellbeing, the wellbeing of our families but also the development of our society at large. However, research also suggests that as we grow older we progressively find fewer real opportunities to (re-)imagine, (re-)discover and truly integrate what we value to do or be into the production of something of value. In other words, as we grow older there is an increased marginalisation of our creative capabilities. The aim and vision of the project is to respond to this challenge by creating a kind of 'habitat' that provides opportunities for people (and the communities in which they belong) to keep growing their creative capabilities as they age. This habitat is envisaged as a network of physical and/or digital spaces, referred to as 'allotments', where people and organisations have opportunities to co-produce or simply engage with physical and/or digital socio-cultural materials and activities, referred to as 'seeds'. Seeds can reach people in their own homes, public or professional environments and aim to work as triggers that inspire and enable people to (re-)imagine and (co-)create something of value for them and others. 'Seeds' are developed to foster curiosity for exploration, connection of people's interests, emotions, aspirations and ideas, integration of different identities, experiences and capabilities and experimentation. The value of this proposal is the opportunity to access 'seeds' that enable people to shape their own 'places', i.e. their own spaces of social connections of trust, valued practices and environments, where they can discover, integrate and connect what they value to do into the production of something of value. The project will develop the first family of seeds and allotments but also the organisational and enterprise model that is required in order to sustainably grow this ecosystem.

How do we build connections in increasingly ageing communities? How do we get better at sharing personal stories and oral histories in ways that build community as well as creating new academic insights? How can we harness the evocative power of lifelong objects and the communicative and archiving potential of digital technologies? The UK population is ageing with the fastest population increases in the numbers of those aged 85 and over. It is projected that by 2035 those aged 65 and over will account for 23% of the total population whilst the number of people aged 85 and over will reach 3.5 million accounting for 5 per cent of the total UK population. These changes have wide ranging implications for our communities, our family relationships, the institutions that are important to us, and concerns related to health and well-being and social trust and isolation. The care home market is growing exponentially creating new communities of circumstance of older people coming together from diverse backgrounds and with unique experiences. Pressing questions arise about how we might create 'community' in these settings and what role oral/life history collection and sharing might play in this process. Our technical development process will involve our interdisciplinary team working with older people to co-design a desirable interface where familiar objects themselves control the interaction. We will augment the objects by associating the oral history digitally to the object. The interface will be designed such that it will be possible for older people, in conversation with their families and/or care home workers, to 'self' curate and input their own stories with minimal interaction with the technology. The look and feel of the interface, as well as its functionality, will be co-produced with older people following an approach based on user-centric, rapid prototyping in collaboration with artists and computer scientists. In the move to a care home lifelong objects may sometimes get lost or misplaced, given away or sold. We will work with an artist-maker experienced in designing beautiful tangible objects to produce a range of 3D 'proxies' for the objects based on categorisations developed in the early stages of the research and design process. Through ownership of the physical augmented object, each individual will have tangible control over who is able to access their memory; whether they want to keep hold of the augmented object for personal use or whether they are willing to share their object with family, friends or others in their care home or beyond it. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team including social historians, digital artists and makers, learning researchers, computer scientists, older people themselves and registered therapists we will co-produce a set of new digital tools that will address some of the key societal challenges concerning the care and well-being of older people and the legacy of the memories and stories that they leave for future generations. We are interested in exploring the way that smart objects and the internet of things might be developed in both historical research and in democratic community building.

Parlours of Wonder: imagining and designing multigenerational spaces of discovery, connection, meaning making and mystery This project builds on the success of the Tangible Memories research project, enabling our partners Alive! (a charity dedicated to improving the quality of life for older people in care by enabling their participation in meaningful activity) to continue to work with us to further embed the project outcomes in their practice and in care settings more widely. Community engagement is increasingly recognized by the care sector and commissioners as vital in tackling issues of social isolation in our older populations living in care settings. Together with Alive! we want to co-design engaging community spaces (parlours) where older people can interact with evocative objects and our app to record and share their memories and life histories. This will involve imagining and creating a new space of discovery, connection, meaning making and mystery, rather like the 'cabinets of curiosity' or 'wonder rooms' of old. Unlike cabinets of curiosity, our 'Parlours of Wonder' will not be designed and curated by us as arts and humanities researchers, artists/designers and computer scientists. Our vision is that these spaces will be co-curated by and for residents, care staff, families and community members. Care managers believe there is huge potential to use these Parlours of Wonder for community engagement where local school children, community groups and isolated older people will be encouraged to enjoy a cup of tea and a chat or a more formal encounter, sparking questions, connections, new interests or opportunities for contemplation. This project has been jointly conceived and developed with Alive!, with artists and with an extra care facility in which we have worked on the Tangible Memories Project. Funding from that research enabled us to co-design and to test our prototypes in the settings. We believe the prototypes, in particular our app, have huge potential to enhance opportunities for older people living in care homes to connect with those in their local community and therefore feel less socially isolated. We know that this will require a change of culture in many care settings and thus working closely with care staff to co-design new spaces of encounter in these settings is vital. This project builds on and further extend our excellent working relationships with Alive!, Blaise Weston Court (an extra care facility) and Hanover Housing, but will extend our activities to reach new groups including BrunelCare, the Britannia Centre (a day care facility) and Deerhurst (a large care home specializing in dementia work). It will also enable us to work closely with policy makers and other influencers to expand the local and national project reach.

This research project tackles the complex problem of how to increase participation in social and cultural life for all as we age which has been shown to make a vital contribution to raising quality of life. The project will address the fundamental issue that arts and cultural participation drops dramatically in older populations and that disabled, Black, Asian and minority ethnic and older people living in poverty are even less likely to participate. It will tackle inequalities related to accessibility and content of digital arts and cultural provision, enable vital R&D and establish new business models to encourage digital innovation in the arts and cultural sector to support healthy ageing. Arts and cultural organisations have been slow to adopt digital innovation, but there is huge potential in using emerging technologies to enable diversification of content and build new older audiences. The pandemic has increased the urgency to harness digital technologies to enhance the accessibility and content of cultural participation so that those who are socially isolated may be able to benefit, increasing their quality of life. The impact of the project will be include: disabled, Black, Asian and minority ethnic and older audiences living in poverty participating in digital arts and cultural experiences that will support their social connections and contribute to improved quality of life; provision of vital R&D support for collaborations between cultural and technology sectors in designing digital innovations, helping them prosper and thus contributing to regional and national sectoral growth; supporting creative industries to build a better understanding of diverse older audiences and to robustly evaluate their offer; and new evidence based policy making that tackles inequalities in arts and cultural provision for healthy ageing outcomes. The project will involve an interdisciplinary team working alongside the cultural sector, creative technology partners and communities of 'next generation' older people (i.e. aged 60-75 years) to understand older people's experiences of digital exclusion, and what they value culturally and socially. This knowledge will then inform the co-design of digitally driven cultural experiences that 'support social connections'. The research will involve designing a new tool to measure the impact of digital cultural experiences on social connectivity for healthy ageing. The audience research will enable new understandings of digitally experienced cultural value, that takes account of older age and inequalities. It will provide robust evidence of how the cultural products we design can potentially contribute to next generation older people enjoying at least five extra healthy, independent years of life.