Co-design of the built environment for mobility in later life

Mobility, wellbeing and the built environment: Wellbeing in later life is linked to the maintenance of independence, physical mobility itself and the sense of being able to get about. Mobility is vital for accessing services, resources and facilities, for social participation, and for avoiding loneliness. Thus mobility has been described more broadly as 'engagement with the world'.

The design of the built environment has a key role to play in enabling - or frustrating - mobility. Thus appropriate design or redesign of the built environment can expand horizons and support wellbeing. However, this project focuses on complements or alternatives to physical design or redesign of the built environment. Design and adaptation are time and resource intensive. Many well-understood mobility barriers remain in place because of budget constraints. Design of the built environment is just one the determinants of mobility and wellbeing. Any one environment cannot meet all needs at once, and needs can vary even for an individual, as people pass through key physical and social transitions which may alter mobility and wellbeing.

Based on participatory research, this project aims to create a suite of options and tools which may be able to meet contrasting needs, support mobility and wellbeing, and do so more quickly and affordably than adapting the built environment.

The research aims to: 1) Explore mobility and wellbeing for older people going through critical but common life transitions; 2) Investigate and address variation and contradictions in needs of different groups of older people (and even for single individuals over time), and between different built environment agendas; and 3) To co-create practical tools which can act as complements or alternatives to redesign of the built environment.

After a foundation stage the work will commence with interviews with national experts and stakeholders. We will select three contrasting local areas in which to base the rest of the research, and interview c15 local stakeholders in each area. We will then start a pioneering quarterly tracking study of mobility and wellbeing, working with c120 older people in the three sites who are experiencing critical but common life transitions such as losing a driving license, losing a partner, or becoming a carer. These transitions are often seen as key points for deterioration in mobility and wellbeing, and as key points for support and intervention.

We will then work with a series of small groups of older people in workshops and co-design sessions, to explore the potential for interventions as alternatives and complements to promoting mobility and wellbeing via redesign. Each will involve a series of day-long meetings between researchers and older people, over about a year. One set of workshops will explore how well 'crowdsourcing' and Participatory Geographical Information Systems can add to and collate information about mobility wants and needs and barriers. Another will involve older people with varying interests in relation to the built environment, to explore conflicts and the potential for consensus on some issues. There will be co-design workshops with older people to explore mobile technologies based on SmartPhones, to help people avoid key blockages to mobility in particular areas. Other workshops will work with mobility scooter users, and manufacturers and those whose mobility may be threatened by scooters, to explore the feasibility of adapting scooters to reduce problems. The impact of participation itself will be tracked.

Project outputs will include: a project website, accessible annual interim and summative reports to project stakeholders and others, a summative report, articles for academic journals across team member disciplines, trade press articles for relevant professionals, potentially video or new media, a local stakeholder and older person conference and national 'Roadshow', as well as other dissemination events.

Plans for impact and pathways to impact are built into the design of the Co-Motion research, which has strong participatory and product development elements. C180 older people and c65 local and national stakeholders with be directly involved in Co-Motion. Key local and national stakeholders are already willing to participate actively, and will be willing and able to assist in dissemination and impact (see Letters of Support).

The project will progress over three years from open-ended interviews and discussions to fully tested prototypes, with substantial plans for dissemination and impact beyond.

The first main part of fieldwork (Workpackage 5 as described in the Case for Support) aims to have particular impact on academic beneficiaries. It provides new knowledge on the impact of key transitions on mobility and wellbeing and how they co-relate, adaptation over time, and variation between individuals.

The next major element of fieldwork with participatory workshops and co-design (Workpackages 6-9) aims to have direct impact on participants, and to produce useful and directly implementable tools, which can assist stakeholders and advance older people's mobility and well-being.

The participatory nature of the research, with workshops and co-design processes, will act as a potential mobility and wellbeing intervention in its own right. Social participation is known to have positive effects on wellbeing in itself. Any impact of involvement on participant mobility and wellbeing will be tracked through brief reviews at the start and end of the process.

In addition, the workshops and co-design processes aim to produce useful and directly implementable tools which can advance older people's mobility and wellbeing. For example, Workpackage 6 'Co-information' will result in low-fi and costed models of 'participatory Geographical Information Systems' (P-GIS), with guidance on the circumstances in which they can be set up and work well. Given the interest already expressed through pre-research contact, Co-Motion hopes and expects that one of the local authorities or NGOs amongst stakeholders, or others reached by dissemination activities, could take these models up in 2015 or 2016. This would allow them to collate information about barriers to older people's mobility in the built environment, and to inform their own guidance and practice, which might lead to better prioritisation of adaptation resources and/or management services. Identifying and altering just one barrier for change can make a great difference to individuals. As the Design Council argues, "a journey can be seen as a chain of individual products and services whose accessibility is only as strong as its weakest link" (Coleman ud p24). Other workshop and co-design outcomes include methods for 'crowdsourcing', deliberative methods for exploring and dealing with conflicts between interests and between different forms of guidance, phone apps, and mobility scooter adaptations.

This project has deliberately not focused not on physical design or potential redesign of the built environment itself but on alternatives and complements to physical change. Building on existing work, for example, by I'DGO, these are intended to provide additional options for stakeholders and make it easier for them to act, particularly given tight resources. Several of them are tools that can be operated at individual level or by users. Thus it is possible that they may contribute more directly to a sense of agency, wellbeing and confidence in mobility than an adaptation to public space made by a public agency.

An additional element of the work creates a typology of places according to built environment and mobility characteristics, to assist the matching potentially useful and implementable interventions to particular places. A final piece of work focuses on dissemination of ideas and outcomes to other audiences during and at the end of the project.