Paper short abstract:

We explore how architects imagine the ageing body when designing UK care homes and the extent to which they engage with older users, based on qualitative data. Architects drew on contrasting images of ageing, the design implementation of which was constrained by the demands of multiple actors.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life and the extent to which they engage empathetically with older users. While research is beginning to examine how the design of assistive living technologies or information and communication technologies draws on - and may inform - particular images of later life (Fisk 2003; Mort, Roberts & Callen 2013; Östlund 2002, 2005), there has been little consideration of how buildings as technoscientific objects elicit particular configurations of older users, or how these emerge in the design process. Accordingly, this paper draws on qualitative data as part of an ongoing ESRC funded UK study 'Buildings in the making'. Our analysis reveals that architects use a range of strategies to imagine the embodied experiences of older people, drawing on personal experience, formal guidance and training, and deliberately using their own bodies to imagine embodied experiences of others negotiating place. Architects draw on multiple discourses and images of ageing with conceptions of older bodies as active and consuming evident alongside discourses of decline and risk. However, the extent to which architects engaged directly with users was variable and contingent, depending on a range of factors in the design process. In negotiating the competing demands of clients, planners and other actors, architects were engaged in a process of 'juggling' (Latour and Yaneva 2008) differently embodied ideas of who the end-users of their building will be, and what they will need and want from the design.