Dr Fanke Peng is an Assistant Professor of Design and course convenor at the University of Canberra. She is also the founder of the Cross-Cultural Design lab and an award-winning designer and researcher, with a research focus on digital fashion and co-design for health and aged care in the global creative economy, design thinking and design innovation. She was a research fellow at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

Wearable memory for healthy ageing

Share life narratives and make your memory visible

Australia and many other countries around the world face a significant population shift. With a fast-growing ageing population, increasingly new issues of varied complexities arise that will require new perspectives to solve them. In this paper, art and design approaches have been presented into aged care to address issues of elderly people’s social isolation in the long-term residential care facilities. A design solution — ‘Wearable Memory’ — has been developed to raise awareness of the value of reminiscence, and to provide intervention to reduce traumatic memory. The co-design process allowed key stakeholders to be involved from the beginning of the project. Wearable Memory can play a vital role in digital storytelling and social bonding within the senior citizens’ culture and community, while providing integrated support and intervention towards their reminiscence.