Mobility, Mood and Place: a user-centred approach to design of built environments to make mobility easy, enjoyable and meaningful for older people

Recent research shows that remaining active is a vital component in healthy ageing and that exercise provides protection against mental decline in old age. People are more mobile if they live in an appropriate environment, one that is safe, accessible and has good services. To date, much guidance has focused on overcoming barriers in the environment, such as steps without handrails or poor quality lighting. Removing such barriers is important but this approach alone will not encourage people to be more active. We need to understand the positive qualities that encourage people to go out, remain mobile, and give them pleasure into very old age. Our proposal builds on growing evidence that mood and emotion influence people's willingness to be active, which is in turn influenced by the experience of different environments - the 'mood' of one place versus another.

Places need to be attractive, in order to support positive moods, and to draw people into them. Some places offer peace and quiet, others offer sociability, excitement or a sense of fun. The environment needs to offer different opportunities according to how people feel at the time. Well-designed places don't automatically put people in a good mood, but we think places that match the emotional needs of the moment contribute to a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle. If the mood of a place is right then people will get out and about, feel better, take better care of their environment, and think of their environment more positively.

Positive emotions broaden people's awareness and encourage them to think and act in novel ways, and to be more curious and exploratory, both mentally and physically. Environments that encourage positive moods affect how competent people are at carrying out everyday tasks, such as preparing meals, going to the shops or planning an outing. People who feel competent are more likely to focus on the positive, to feel well, to make healthy choices, and to be more mobile.

We will draw on our studies of the patterns, causes, and effects of health conditions among groups of people (epidemiology), combined with techniques in neuroscience involving brain imaging. We will also work in equal partnership with older people, including stroke survivors and people with dementia, to design together better environments. This innovative combination of approaches will help us to deliver new ideas about the design of places that support positive emotions, reduce anxiety, and encourage people to be more active and mobile, long into old age. Well-designed and maintained environments should make mobility an easy, enjoyable and meaningful choice.

Our research is structured around four Work Packages involving: (1) designing together with older people, (2) examining data from recordings of neural signals (EEG) while people are moving through different environments, (3) studying information from a large group of older people born in the 1920s and 30s, to understand patterns of environment, activity and health over their life course, and (4) working with partners to evaluate and share our results and develop illustrated, user-friendly guidance on how to provide better environments in future.

Our team of researchers has expertise in environment, health, wellbeing, social policy and collaborative design, with an excellent track record of past Research Council and other major grants. We have experience in providing design guidance for the built environment, innovative approaches to measuring people's responses to their environment, working with them to understand their preferences, and analysing the implications of results. We also have experience in mapping important aspects of the environment.

To maximise the impact of our research, we will mobilise our ongoing partnerships with policy-makers at national and local government level, with professional bodies, and with third sector organisations supporting older people and age-friendly environmental design.

Who will benefit from this research?

For the successful application of our research findings to everyday challenges and opportunities, we will take a cross-cutting approach to the types of stakeholders we engage with and to the ways in which we engage with them. The research beneficiaries will be:

- Local, central and European government, including elected members and officials; Thinktanks and non-departmental public bodies.
- Public sector practitioners in health, housing and social care; Professional organisations spanning these sectors.
- Private sector practitioners in planning, urban design, product design, architecture, landscape architecture, transport consultancy and highways engineering; Professional member organisations spanning these sectors; Mobility and telecare industry.
- Not-for-profit organisations and charities spanning sectors outlined above, plus those dedicated to older people's issues; Older people, their families and carers.
- Academic networks promoting interdisciplinary work in sectors outlined above.

How will they benefit from this research?

Mobility, Mood and Place is rooted in co-creative principles, with projected outputs tailored to the advancement, not only of academic expertise but also of the UK's wider knowledge base, its society, people and economy. As an interdisciplinary team, we have excellent existing connections within different spheres of influence and sectors and will achieve maximum socio-economic impact by strengthening the networks between them.

We have a clear perspective on where ageing and mobility issues sit within the focus of the four UK governments, with whom we have established good contacts. Our team has input into health, quality of life and social inclusion strategies at the critical early stages, including the new Five Year Ageing Well programme in Wales, which will evolve as our project does. By the end of Mobility, Mood and Place we will have produced a series of policy papers. They will offer sustainable, long-term options to those tasked with reducing health inequalities among older populations.

We have strong links with Local Government bodies and various individual councils and health boards. Liaising with them will assist in identifying live research sites and facilitate direct engagement with older stakeholders for research recruitment and communication. We will include design principles and exemplars among our outputs, developed collaboratively by trainee/early career designers, researchers and older people. This will enhance designers' skills before they enter professional practice and refine a model for workshops to be more widely used in architectural education.

We know that age-friendly services can give manufacturers a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Through business-led position papers based on academic evidence, we will provide feedback to industry from an older population with an increasing economic profile and influence. Our work will aid understanding of underlying reasons for different physical behaviours and emotional responses to place, and therefore how people might respond to different interventions in the built environment. We will facilitate training events that bring together professional organisations, so that each develops an understanding of how the others assess, interpret and meet user needs.

Many older people are themselves active in lobbying for more age-friendly design. We aim to better enable them to do so, e.g. through social networking. To reach those who are not technologically enabled, as well as other user groups, we will secure the partnership of charities and not-for-profit organisations. We will work with stakeholders to promote the positive effects of care home residents remaining active in the community and to assist care providers in making more informed choices with respect to the mobility of older service users, including the significant proportion (~50%) with some form of dementia.