Reimagining ‘Ageing’ projects slide deck
Theme: Life course ageing and intergenerational connectivity
Imagination crisis
Arts funding targeting at exploring social and cultural questions of ageing are ring-fenced for engaging old or young people in artistic activity rather than supporting people of all ages to express their experience of ageing through creativity.
This means that there is little or no artistic discourse about what it means to experience being alive in time within our culture, and invite us to imagine otherwise
What was made
More than 50 artists came together to make artworks which expressed their experiences of ageing across their life course. Some worked collaboratively and some individually. Some examples of what we made are offered on the next two slides,
An intergenerational dance accompanied by shakespeare
A lego exploration of clothing colour across the lifecourse.
Sound and sensory experience of natural objects aligned with lifecourse stages.
A creative exploration of ageing across our lives: A makers event
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Artists created multiple artworks revealing new insights about living in time. As audiences of each other’s art we understood in a profoundly deeper way the life course experience. The diversity of mediums and approaches challenged everyone’s existing assumptions about ‘ageing’. Some artists continued this work with us during lockdown through online workshops.
Imagine if?
Throughout our lives we had the opportunity to creatively reflect on our experience of being alive in time and learn from each other.
Imagine if funding for the arts was expanded beyond arts activities for old or young people and also included the exploration of aging for people of all ages.
This artwork uses coloured lego to explore the way culture suggests ‘age appropriate’ colour choices for clothing across the lifecourse for men and women.
This artwork is a dance, performed at different speeds and accompanies by shakespeare Narration - it explores how the same movement at different speeds in differently aged bodies holds beauty and identity.
Natural items which experiences with our hands and ears evoke the experiences of different parts of the lifecourse
The imagination crisis
Since the 1970s moving away from home to find work and adventure has become normal, fragmenting inter-generational ties between and within families. 'Place' no longer offers multiple tethers to belonging for people of all ages. This is generally seen as a problem for old people but we all lose when connectivity across families and neighbours breaks down.
The programme aimed to engage communities to develop a shared vision of ageing that serves and includes people of all ages. This visioning would include stakeholders from across the community and have a set of projects and activities which enabled the vision to take root locally. A theory of change for place-based initiatives which seek to address inequality of connection for people of all ages was developed with the help of a funder eager to deepen learning about place based working.
Imagining a ‘place’ able to embrace demographic change
We experienced high levels of interest from communities across the country eager to gather all- age stakeholders and break out of siloed ways of working together.
Embracing Ageing: Scoping a place-based action learning programme
The funder could see how the normal way of offering age-segregated services reinforces community fragmentation, but, they were uncertain of what the impact of breaking those down might be. As were we, because it hasn’t been done before. Imagination enables us to navigate uncertainty when our current solutions leave us stuck. But unfortunately, the funder lost heart deeming the programme too high risk without predictable outcomes. They withdrew their commitment and the work ended.
This experience demonstrates how ill-equipped we are to re-imagine age within the current system and that we will only find out how to ‘think’ differently by ‘doing’ differently, amidst uncertainty.
Imagine if?
The imagination crisis
Fear of ageing and the changes it brings is ubiquitous, and yet we know that many people experience their later years as joyous and rich.
From where we are now, a future which includes probable deterioration in health, the loss of peers, the loss of work, can feel like something to run from. But we know that the story isn’t all about loss, it’s about change. New things also come, added as ring around a tree. The ‘alive’ part of the tree is always the outer layer just beneath the bark, the inner rings show the vascular tissue from previous years, they are not technically ‘alive’ but they are a supportive and integral part of the tree, essential to sustain the ‘now’ of the outer layer. A narrative of ageing which focuses on the loss fails to support us to accept change and receive the new life that is coming.
We also know that perceived happiness is typically higher for older people than it is for younger. Some studies have identified 82 years as peak happiness! If that surprises you, it is yet another indication that our cultural narrative of ageing has made you believe otherwise.
Age of Creativity 2nd May 2019: IMAGINARIUM IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
This guided meditation experience as held at the Age of Creativity Conference in 2019 with a group of around 80 participants.
Imagining the future
This guided meditation mirrors in both space and time the appreciation of the parts of our lives that have gone before and the ones to come. ACCESS RECORDING HERE
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Approximately 80 people participated. Many found themselves moved to tears as they experienced their older selves as rich and vibrant beings, just as much themselves as they are now. Even though many participants worked in organisations which advocate for older people they were started to experience their future selves as joyfully as they did. Following this we were invited to run the experience in many other locations.
Imagine if?
We were all supported to think of our lives as additions and not as subtractions.
The Imagination crisis
When we think of ageing we think of the tick tick of days, weeks months, and years. But if we zoom out we can gain another perspective, one which is still common within indigenous communities that understand their connectivity to generations who went before and generations to come.
This drop in workshop was held in the Living and Dying Room at the British Museum. We invited people of all ages to imagine themselves as receivers and givers of life, part of a great chain of receiving and giving at the micro scale of daily exchange and the macro scale of exchange across multiple generations.
More than 200 people participated. The activities are meaningful for all ages and cultures and very easy to replicate in your own community.
Growing the social imagination
We offered three related creative activities which explored how throughout our lives we receive and give on to others.
A participatory creative day on ageing at the British Museum
Braiding the future - life is like a braid or plait. The people, places, activities and objects in our lives change as we age but new ones come into the gap they have left creating a continuous story a continuous experience of becoming. This is also true for generations overlapping and replacing one another. In a braid a new string can be added to keep the thread alive. We provided many ribbons for museum visitor to use in adding to the long braid, which kept growing, new hands bringing new threads.
gratitude labels - As the braid got longer and longer visitors wrote onto paper luggage labels the things, characteristics, histories etc. they had inherited that they were thankful for. These were tied into the long braid. We had a piano, my smile, knitting, my house, my love of plants, eating burnt toast….any many many more things that people were thankful to have inherited.
Legacy Badges - visitors to the museum were invited to make a badge which represented something they would like to pass on. This might be a physical thing (eg a bicycle) or perhaps a gesture such as a hug. Visitors made a badge, but not for themselves but for someone else, leaving the one they made and taking one which someone else had created.
A participatory creative day on ageing at the British Museum
The imagination crisis
When COVID hit many older people felt diminished by the label ‘vulnerable’. Nurturing a mindset which moved away from this narrative felt urgent and we offered a series of onlines sessions for artists curious about using creativity to explore the experience of ageing across the life course - at all ages.
Growing the social imagination
At each session we offered opening thoughts and a provocation for artistic expression. Everyone then had 10 minutes alone to think of an artwork that could respond to the provocation. These were shared and developed in small groups, prompting expansive discussions about what age and ageing really means to us individually and collectively.
Here is list of the provocations we worked with:
Session 1 What memories do you have from your own lives which your identification with your age was a strong thread?
Session 2 Are there moments of your life when you found yourself with no age or age neutral or an age other than your own?
Session 3 How can sensory experience collapse or expand time? how we can track shifting sensory changes across a lifecourse?
Session 4 How can Sci-Fi help us imagine ways to access the intelligence of different ages (and cultures) as if it were our own?
An artistic exploration of ageing: a peer led learning journey
Session 5 How does age justice rubs up against climate justice?.
Session 6 Reflection and artwork sharing session
Session 7 Guest presenter Sophie Handler took us through an exploration of our language of ageing.
Session 8 Birthday cards can ridicule age but what would playful cards that celebrate ageing look like?
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Several of the artists created new artworks, such as visual art, music and poems promoted by these explorations. Many who attended the sessions run art experiences for older people (as defined by funding streams) and they took some of what they experienced into those spaces.
What if………
There were opportunities to creatively explore ageing across the life course, to delve into our sensory experiences and perceptions of ageing and age?
What impact would this have on our feelings, attitudes and behaviour towards our ageing and others?
An artistic exploration of ageing: a peer led learning journey
not age thinking.
Theme: Transitions thinking
The imagination crisis
Our current model of retirement isn’t working because we now regularly live much more than the 3 years which was expected when it was designed. People don’t want to fade into the background, they want to sustain purpose, keep earning, attend to care responsibilities, and have a vibrant social life. But all of that doesn’t fit into what society expects of them. This creates emotional strain in some triggering mental health deterioration at retirement.
Growing the social imagination
Normalising the conversation: We created a 2 day pre-retirement experiential course which used real life stories of retirement as the springboard for participants voicing their fears and hopes. The relief of having a different conversation to ‘pensions’ was enormous, surfacing lurking questions they didn’t know they had.
Embodied reflection on a valuable future: Having surfaced assumptions we created reflective experiences including a guided labyrinth walk which took place outdoors and responded to the things they encountered.
Restor(y)ing Retirement: An emotional resilience course for retirement
We invited them to model futures which were valuable to them using lego, card and playdough. All of this they used to set personal intentions for their future.
Connection to real opportunities: we invited experts from the local community to talk about real opportunities to explore purpose; start businesses, continue working, volunteer etc. Getting the tools and encouragement to navigate the post-work world showed participants they could make things happen, and it’s okay to ask for help getting there.
What’s the expanded imagination looking like today?
The biggest surprise to participants was how much they needed to explore these questions with others in order to reveal how personalised and collective assumptions about retirement were shaping their opportunities. Individually they established strategies for managing change and leaning into purpose with many instances of people making big life turnarounds.
Imagine if?
We were all supported throughout our lives to embrace our age/life stage identity, not to fear it, or use it as a marker of success but to embrace the past, present and future all at once.
The imagination crisis
The decades from 40-70 have been identified as ‘in-betweener’. Outdated social expectations of middle/older age expect people of 40+ to fade into into the background. But longer life-spans means this group is active and passionate: what a waste! The Oxford Jam was an annual three-day event nurturing leaders of social innovation and enterprise. We ran a session to expose these assumptions and re-imagine their entrepreneurial potential.
Growing the social imagination
We kicked off with the construction of a tower of 10 cardboard boxes. Each represented a decade of life (0-10 yrs up to 100 yrs). Participants were asked to answer 3 questions for each decade:
As answers were speedily called out they were written onto the boxes. The younger decades were defined by abundance eg. play, exciting, learning, “forming new....”, “building a…”, starting a ....” whereas later boxes were sparsely populated and loss-focused.
Meet the New In-Betweeners: An Awareness raising session at the Oxford Jam
We reflected together on why this was and if we really believed playfulness and generativity should only be for the young?
With a fresh box, groups of participants redefined the hopes and challenges of the three in-betweener decades (40- 70yrs), allowing older people to be all the things they were allowed to be in their youth. The original deficit-oriented boxes were replaced by the new ones.
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
The revised tower highlighted the vigour and possibilities that had been summoned into the in-betweener decades reflecting the incredible opportunity this stage could be. Social entrepreneurs, innovation support services and those offering social finance reflected on how they would revise their assumptions about in-
betweeners inviting their creativity to flourish.
Imagine if?
It was just as easy for people of 40-70 to receive advice about their career/purpose as those aged 10-39?
Imagine if those at all age were encouraged and financed to start new ventures, retrain and become beginners again!
Meet the New In-Betweeners: An Awareness raising session at the Oxford Jam
Theme: Ageism, Arts and Activism
Better Birthdays
The imagination crisis
Ageism is still acceptable in our society and public awareness of its harmful effects is very low. Most anti-ageism campaigns address discrimination in the workplace or advocate for less ‘stereotypical’ language and images of older people in the media. Very little seeks to challenge the general public about their own attitudes towards ageing. Better Birthdays is a global movement focusing on birthdays as a platform for understanding ageism.
Growing the social imagination
Birthdays are celebrated at every age, across many cultures and are intrinsically linked to ageing. Sometimes we feel good about them, sometimes we don’t. This ambivalence reflects culturally embedded fears of ageing: Are you ‘on track’ for your age? Do you wish you were a different age? Do you accept the way your mind / body has changed?
In 2020 we partnered with Changing the Narrative and Age Friendly Vibes in the USA, to launch Better Birthdays. Since then we have:
Better Birthdays Campaign
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Participants from the general public and the card industry have engaged creatively with the birthdays theme, often claiming how transformational of their attitudes it has been. Across the globe anti-ageism organisations have supported us and in the UK, the card industry has made big changes to grow the market for age-positive cards.
Imagine if…..
Birthdays were the moment we celebrated being alive in time!
The imagination crisis
Ageism is still acceptable in our society and public awareness of its harmful effects is very low. Most anti-ageism campaigns address discrimination in the workplace or advocate for less ‘stereotypical’ language and images of older people in the media. Very little seeks to challenge the general public about their own attitudes towards ageing. Better Birthdays is a global movement focusing on birthdays as a platform for understanding ageism.
Growing the social imagination
Birthdays are celebrated at every age, across many cultures and are intrinsically linked to ageing. Sometimes we feel good about them, sometimes we don’t. This ambivalence reflects culturally embedded fears of ageing: Are you ‘on track’ for your age? Do you wish you were a different age? Do you accept the way your mind / body has changed?
In 2020 we partnered with Changing the Narrative and Age Friendly Vibes in the USA, to launch Better Birthdays. Since then we have:
Better Birthdays Campaign
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Participants from the general public and the card industry have found engaging creatively with this birthdays transformational. Across the globe anti-ageism organisations have supported us and in the UK the card industry has made big changes to grow the market for age-positive cards.
Imagine if…..
Birthdays were the moment we celebrated being alive in time!
The imagination crisis
Getting public visibility of ageism is hard in a culture which doesn’t think it is important and a time when it is socially acceptable to reinforce ageist stereotypes. Building on the Better Birthdays Campaign we have launched a range of stickers which can be placed in public places to raise awareness and prompt questions. Because awareness is low there isn’t a groundswell of passionate activists campaigning in high profile ways for change.
Growing the social imagination
This started as a part of the Better Birthdays campaign when we created small stickers to place on particularly offensive birthday cards, alerting potential buyers of the card that it was spreading damaging stereotypes. This is a simple and low-risk kind of protest and connected with the appetite of our network. There was a sudden demand, and they are being stuck all over the place!
That got us thinking about how we might use stickers not only as a warning but also as encouragement. Which is how we arrived at the ‘I Ageing’ stickers, which we distribute at all our events.
Anti-ageist sticker campaign
What’s the expanded imagination looking like?
Stickers are being stuck in all sorts of places!
Imagine if…..
Birthdays were the moment we celebrated being alive in time!
The imagination crisis
Almost all anti-ageist campaigns focus on people of 50+attempting to address ageism against older people. But we know three very important things. First, ageism is experienced by people across their life course not only by the 50+. Second, belief in negative stereotypes of older people has already embedded in our psyche by the time we are 4 years old. Third, ageism against ourselves is extremely common and harms our mental health and sense of agency.
Addressing Ageism across the life course: ILC conference Future of Ageing December 2020
Growing the social imagination
In our contribution to the ILC 2020 conference we spoke directly to how linea concepts of ageing keep us stuck in a deficit model where the second half of life is seen as less valuable than the first. We challenged the age sector and people in general to own this for themselves and examine how their anti-ageism campaign align with mopping up the mess at 50+ rather than inviting us at every age to feel hopeful and thankful about all stages of life.
Imagine if….
Anti-ageist activism threw out linea concepts of time. Imagine if we were inspired to make sense of our own ageing using the wisdom of trees, jellyfish and stardust!