FLEX - Flexible Dwellings for Extended Living

This project looks into the future of our homes and explores the potential for adapting our dwellings to deal with the pressures of 21st century living - an ageing population, increasing atomization of the family, expensive housing, environmental targets, spiralling energy costs, and the risk of social isolation. These challenges suggest opportunities for collaboration between communities of research, practice and occupants who wish to explore configurable spaces, flexible materials, green living, and pervasive media. To harness this energy, we explore the boundaries of private and public living, involving the communities of Newcastle and Dundee in co-design workshops that focus on how communities might dwell more socially to better serve companionship, resource sharing and social resilience. We target people in their 40s to 60s, for whom retirement is on its way, to identify their interests and values and assess how retro-fitting a generation of homes could work to increase sociality.

We will run a specialist workshop for architects, designers, planners and materials experts to discuss the innovations that are possible in fitting up homes for different life stages and making communal living more possible. Materials prepared following this event and incorporating the learning will be used in community workshops in Newcastle and Dundee, to be stimulus for collaborative designing of future homes. Through this work we will explore the boundaries of acceptability and affordability, what local priorities would be and how far innovations can be imagined working in ordinary homes in Scotland and England. Through this process, we will come to learn both what would be welcomed in households in Scotland and England, and also some insight into methods of engaging households in making such changes.

The project discoveries will be captured in a blog, using video, and presented in an exhibition mounted in the two chosen areas. Feedback from these sources will go into the final evaluation of what is possible and desirable in modifying existing homes to accommodate a more socially resilient and supportive lifestyle.

This research will develop knowledge within the community and the impact will reach a broad range of stakeholders, including community organisations and policy makers. We have identified the following possible professional beneficiaries:
* Architects/ designers and their professional bodies: RIBA, RIAS, ARB, and CSD, BIID, SBID and SBID Society of British Interior Designers / BIID British Institute of Interior Design / IFI International Federation of Interior Design Interior Architects
* House builders and housing developers (to influence development of new builds)
* Housing associations and local authorities
* Homes & Communities Agency's Vulnerable and Older People's Advisory group
* Older people groups/ think tanks/ advocacy and campaigning bodies
* Design Council CABE
* Dept for Communities and Local Government
* Cooperative/ co-housing groups/ advocacy and campaigning bodies
* Other architecture centres and organisations that engage communities in the built environment

This research has the potential to contribute profoundly to the nation's health and culture by establishing and sharing ways to combat social isolation through innovative housing design for existing dwellings. (70% of housing stock in 2050 will be stock already in existence now - Dept of Communities and Local Government Committee, 2007)

We will be bringing together design, architecture, older people's issues and a brief to retrofit homes for conviviality and sociality. This interdisciplinarity intrinsically broadens the impact of the findings by engaging stakeholders from the different areas and creating a new central hub to attract organisations with different perspectives to share their own resources. This is exemplified in the blog, which we will develop to report on and share findings of our project and others in related fields.

We are fortunate to have Northern Architecture's Carol Botten as a project co-manager and consultant. She is able to mobilise an extensive set of contacts all over the north-east, and also through the rest of Britain through the countrywide network of regional architecture centres. With the reach of these centres, whose brief is to engage communities in working to improve place and space, we have a ready-made path for turning findings into impact on professional bodies, community organisations and policy-makers.

The results will make a contribution to public policy through better understanding how communities in Scotland and England understand the opportunities becoming available to them. The research also has the potential to improve the offering from social housing organizations (and private sector housing developers, although this is not our principal audience since we are focusing on existing housing stock).

There will be a direct impact on the participants through developing understanding of their own domestic environments. This will, in turn, be reflected in the blog and therefore become shared public knowledge, for practitioner groups and academics to help understand vernacular perspectives.

Among the organisations we can have a direct impact upon are the UK Cohousing Network (http://cohousing.org.uk/) which is made up of people from established and forming cohousing groups in England & Wales; Independent Living (http://www.independentliving.co.uk/), a site for impartial information about products and services to help with mobility and independence, and our collaborator, The Elders Council (http://www.elderscouncil.org.uk/working_groups/?id=12).

The Elders Council has a specific Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods group which we will involve in workshops.The Elders Council is part of the Quality of Life Partnership, another wider network relating to Newcastle/older people which we will be able to use to disseminate, reflecting Northern Architecture's strong links here, with connections to Age UK and Newcastle City Council, among other local authorities.