New roles of designers in democratic innovation: a case study in the ingenuity of ageing

Abstract

This paper discusses a study of a group of retired academics that are actively ageing on their university campus in China. We worked with this group of ingenious older people and conducted a series of Creative Dialogues and Design Festivals to see how designers accomplish infrastructuring and mobilization in design participatory innovation for an ageing population. Inspired by the idea of the design process as Things and the concept of community-of-practice, we analysed how they design their lives. We found important new roles for designers in the critique of design ideology and the identification of utopian elements from the participants.

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