City Research Online

Abstract

This paper presents Dovetails, an intergenerational co-creative participatory design project, and explored ways of working with recipients of care through Craft methods leveraging reciprocity to support wellbeing and Citizenship. Working alongside older adults from Beamish Museum’s wellbeing community and a children’s charity, researchers supported the two participating groups to design and make ambitious, novel artefacts for one another using woodwork. Each group learned new skills and sought to improve the lives of the other group’s members through making. We came to understand the artefacts created as material embodiments of care and we present transferable insight for future study design to encourage reciprocity through Craft. We contribute new nuanced understandings of Personhood and Citizenship in this context. Participants reported pride in their achievements, confounding expectations, raising ambitions, and reframing their understanding of their own wellbeing, for example in the context of dementia diagnosis. Dovetails bore meaningful benefits for individual participants and the groups themselves, beyond the timescale of our engagement, as they formed ongoing allegiances. We discuss framing design research through a ‘Craft Lens’, as a multi-faceted way to explore creative engagements, which enriched our understanding of making, and gift-giving to support Personhood through Social Citizenship.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Participatory design, dementia, intergenerational, citizenship, craft, personhood, reciprocity, care
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Computer Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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