Empirical studies

The fieldwork of this thesis consists of four empirical studies which are qualitative and grounded in three study contexts: two housing areas in Copenhagen, Denmark and one in

Figure 6: Empirical studies

EXPLORING AN AGE-FRIENDLY CO-DESIGN APPROACH TO THE SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DEVELOPING AFCC

Sisimiut, Greenland. See figure 6. All four empirical studies are at the centre of the articles in the following Chapter 5, and hence I will not go into too much detail on them in this chapter. However, I will briefly outline their respective aims and the time frame in order to set the scene for the following methodological elaborations.

Study 1

This first study has the form of go-along interviews and took place in the two housing areas in Copenhagen (context description in Chapter 1). The aim of the study was in a literal sense to take the first step into the research process and enter into a field by putting one foot in front of the other.

Additionally, the aim was to gain knowledge about two existing contexts by letting the older people guide me through their neighbourhood in order for me to obtain knowledge about their social and physical environment and how they could play active partners in such an exploration. These go-along interviews can be seen as starting points for the following co-design processes. Following my go-along interviews my colleague conducted ethnographic fieldwork, and both ‘pre-studies’ highly informed the planning of the subsequent co-design processes.

Sixteen participants signed up for the go-along interviews taking me for walks in their local neighbourhood during the months of August and September 2016.

I have dedicated article one: ‘Going along with older people: exploring age-friendly neighbourhood design through their lens’ (Carroll, Jespersen, & Troelsen, 2019) to the study of the go-along interview as a method of investigating that serves to building rapport, engagement and empowerment of older people in the exploration of neighbourhood design.

Studies 2 and 3

The second and the third empirical studies consist of two parallel co-design processes in the two senior housing areas in Copenhagen. The processes were carried out separately, but they were planned in parallel and followed the same structures with contextualisation to the respective housing areas. Design events during the implementation stages were carried

out jointly between the two housing areas, which is why I present them under this joint headline. The aim of the studies was to develop age-friendly design solutions in the local neighbourhood through a co-design process with older people. In line with my PhD aim, I explored the process of how to involve older people in co-design and what this required from the process and our methods in order to optimize the age-friendliness.

Both studies consisted of four pre-scheduled design events in the form of workshops: The first workshop was scheduled to be an immersion session, the second an ideation, the third a prototyping and the fourth a presentation and refinement event. This outline was proposed to give each workshop a clear purpose and to ensure that we would go through all stages of a design process in line with the definitions of co-design that we draw upon and that were explained in Chapters 1 and 3 (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). However, we were well aware that the different workshops overlapped in terms of phases and include elements from each other. In addition to the four pre-scheduled workshops, implementation events were added along the way as the respective processes evolved. Lastly, the research team and the participants jointly organised a ‘party’ in both housing areas (as mentioned in Chapter 1), which can be seen as a ‘delivery’ stage in order to officially hand over the project to the local context and to celebrate the collaboration.

Figure 7: Studies 2 and 3

The workshops ran in parallel on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a few exceptions and spanned eight weeks in the spring of 2017. However, the entire co-design process started with the recruitment and the visibility of the project in 2016 during the go-along interviews and the ethnographic fieldwork and lasted until the last delivery in August 2018. An estimated 100 older people participated in the respective events.

I have dedicated article two: ‘Co-designing Age-friendly Neighbourhood Spaces in Copenhagen: Starting with an Age-friendly Co-design Process’ (prepared for submission) to the studies of the two co-design processes in Copenhagen. In the article I seek to explore what makes a co-design process particularly age-friendly, and hence the decision to draw on both studies offered an opportunity to expand the data set and qualify the findings.

Study 4

The fourth empirical study consists of a co-design process in Greenland. Including the Greenlandic study in this thesis was not pre-defined when I kicked off this PhD project, and I see it as an exploration in itself. The opportunity arose when the research network Ageing in the Arctic (AgeArc)⁶ invited our project team to assist with a co-design process with a group of older people of the same socio-economic status as in Copenhagen.⁷

The study context is Sisimiut, the second largest city in Greenland and the home of approximately 6,000 people. The city is located in Qeqqata Municipality on the west coast of Greenland in a rural setting between mountains, sea and wild nature. On the outskirts of the city, right at the edge of the mountains, lies a public senior housing area, which is the study context of this empirical study. The area consists of 48 apartments distributed in four building blocks of 2-3 storeys. All residents are retired, and out of the 48 households 41 residents live alone with the remaining seven living with a partner. It has not been possible to obtain a record of how long the current residents have lived in the housing area. With the surrounding nature in close proximity, all apartments have a view of the mountains; however

6 https://agearc.ku.dk/

7 The collaboration has been described in this co-authored publication (Nørtoft et al., 2018) (appendix 2)

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access is limited for people with low mobility. The local home care unit had initiated a project called ‘Healthy and Active Ageing’, where one of the aims was to create better access to nature for the older residents.

For both research networks, APEN and AgeArc, it was an opportunity to contextualise, adjust and explore co-design processes and methods with older people in a different practice setting but with the same socio-economic status as in Copenhagen in order to expand the knowledge field and future processes within co-design of AFCCs. Hence, my decision to include this study in this PhD should not be regarded as a limitation of the Copenhagen studies but rather as an exploration to qualify these insights, by adding insights from another study context.

The co-design events followed the same structure as in Copenhagen, although confined to a shorter time frame due to time schedules. Four workshops took place over a period of two weeks in the summer of 2018. The first workshop evolved around immersion, the second around ideation, the third around prototyping and on-site testing and the fourth consisted of presentation and refinements. During this time period I was present in Sisimiut.

MONEY

Following this process, the local collaborators arranged various implementation events including a ‘party to celebrate that money for construction had been granted’ and a ‘first joint walk’ as an official opening of one of the built solutions. An estimated 50 older people participated during the respective events.

I have dedicated article three, ‘That Adrenaline and Dynamic’: The Significance of Age-friendly Co-design in a Multi-stakeholder Collaboration in Greenland’ (prepared for submission) to the study of the co-design process in Greenland. In the article I seek to explore the significance of an age-friendly co-design approach in a multi stakeholder situation when co-designing AFCCs.

4.3. Exploring through go-along interviews