Active Ageing as a Community of Practice
摘要
Ageing can be situated at various levels in a spectrum ranging from personal to global. The policies influencing the concerns about Active Ageing, a WHO propagated concept about improving the quality of life as people age, has global, national, and regional qualities. Design’s tendency of addressing concerns as solvable problems (by studying facts claiming to have objective, clearly observable and deducible qualities) has been confronted with reality checks in the previous decades reflecting back on its role as a facilitator/communicator of such concerns. The Research Through Design (RTD) methodology offers designers opportunities to engage more intimately with complex issues such as ageing and to explore more effective ways of addressing them. Conceiving future possibilities, one of the critical strengths of design, by engaging various stakeholders to come together and work in a synergy is explored through participatory and co-creative methods. From a sociological perspective, a community can be considered as a group of people, mostly functioning as a unit, pursuing specific goals or interests. This may be defined by the nature of set physical (e.g. people occupying within the borders of a region) or virtual boundaries (community of online users).