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Digital Intervention in Loneliness in Older Adults: Qualitative Analysis of User Studies
Full text linkBackground:
Loneliness is a significant well-being issue that affects older adults. Existing, commonly used social connection platforms do not contain facilities to break the cognitive cycle of loneliness, and loneliness interventions implemented without due processes could have detrimental effects on well-being. There is also a lack of digital technology designed with older adults.
Objective:
We aimed to iteratively design a user-centered smartphone app that can address loneliness in older adults. The aim of this study was to investigate the loneliness-related psychological processes that our conceptual smartphone app promotes. We also identified the emergent needs and concerns that older adults raised regarding the potential benefits and detriments of the
app.
Methods:
We used technology probes to elicit older adults’ reflections on the concept of using the app in 2 studies as follows: concept focus groups (n=33) and concept interviews (n=10). We then conducted a prototype trial with 1 week of use and follow-up interviews (n=12).
Results:
Thematic analysis explored the experiences and emergent challenges of our app through the design process. This led to the development of 4 themes as follows occurring in all 3 qualitative data sets: reflection on a digital social map is reassuring; app features encourage socializing; the risk of compounding loneliness; and individuals feel more control with mutual, socially beneficial activities.
Conclusions:
Smartphone apps have the potential to increase older adults’ awareness of the richness of their social connections, which may support loneliness reduction. Our qualitative approach to app design enabled the inclusion of older adults’ experiences
in technology design. Thus, we conclude that the older adults in our study most desired functionalities that can support mutual activities and maintain or find new connections rather than enable them to share an emotional state. They were wary of the app replacing their preferred in-person social interaction. Participants also raised concerns about making the user aware of the lack of support in their social network and wanted specific means of addressing their needs. Further user-centered design work could identify how the app can support mutual activities and socializing
The Moving Canvas Project
No full textCelebrating the interplay between dance and mark making, this performance presents the conclusion of a participatory research project led by AUB academics Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley with community dance company Co-Evo. The Moving Canvas Project explores the kinesthetic inhabitance of wearable canvasses marked with pens to create unique and original textile design whilst creating choreography
Green Words: an anthology of natural words from West Dorset
No full text‘Green Words’ is a walking & writing wellbeing project that will take place in the Bridport area of West Dorset in Spring 2023. The idea is to lead short inspiring walks in the local area to encourage those who would not normally go for a nature walk to learn to appreciate the biodiversity on their doorstep and at the same time improve their health and wellbeing. The walks will cover a variety of terrain appealing to a range of abilities from those with limited mobility to the confident walker. Guided creative writing workshops (also FREE) will be held in Bridport’s Literary and Scientific Institute on East Street following each walk led by an experienced facilitator, Dr Kevan Manwaring, who is the Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth, and a keen walker. Over 10 weeks ‘green words’ will be nurtured and honed, leading to an anthology co- designed and co-produced by the group – with contributions of poems, prose, photographs, and drawings. The anthology will be launched at a final showcase, held in Bridport Arts Centre.
The project, initiated by Bridport-based Dr Manwaring, is funded by the Dorset Community Fund, with the support of Mick Smith, director of Bridport Arts Centre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023 with a range of events. The Arts Centre is keen to promote environmental initiatives and awareness-raising as part of its core goals
Improvisation jamming, under the COVID cloud
No full textThis film explores the relationship between the free expression of improvised drawing and the intertwined practice of movement and music in what we frame as ‘creative jamming’. The film tracks the journey from studio-based improvisation jamming to on-line practice imposed by the onset of the 2020 pandemic which forced remote working and collaboration. Our sites of encounter shifted from performance spaces to our home environments, where multiple spaces were simultaneously connected using technology. Through the practice we discovered that bodies, objects, materials and movement could be shared, replicated, recycled and mirrored back to us. The film observes how the pandemic opened new spaces for play, imagination and world building; the adaption of practice from live to digital performance breeds both difference and familiarity. No longer inhabiting the same physical space, this new environment, created and framed by the lens of the laptop and phone camera, holds the practice somewhere between different houses creating a catalyst for new observations and inquiry. The film demonstrates that the gap created by the COVID-19 lockdown bought with it new creative elements including using the technology as a mode of enquiry, rather than merely a form of recording the performance
Creative improvisation jamming, under the COVID cloud
Full text linkThis visual essay will explore the themes of collaboration, play, the digital intermediatory space and how we engage with the digital ‘other’ of yourself. The research builds on the work of Stark Smith's The Underscore (1987). This long-form dance improvisation structure is used to frame the creative journey which takes place within a jam session offers a platform to explore and consider how the experience might be re-framed with in an online context. The research also draws upon the writing of Weber, Mizanty & Allen (2017) who present digital conference tools as a method to create and teach choreography, and Francksen’s writing around how the use of digital technology produces the digital body, which can interact with the performative body (2014). The research further extends the understanding of these digital spaces as places for intangible, ephemeral, and communal play. This new practice gave a chance for reflection on both our artistic practices and our lives during the pandemic; Halprin’s Life/Art Process has been a supportive model for understanding the therapeutic nature of jamming practice (1995). The drawings and short films created during this project document the process, but also have currency as individual artefacts. The observations and recommendations below will be presented alongside empirical research about the relationship between the artists’ practice and how through drawing and movement they found beneficial creative exchange, in a temporary digital space
Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension
No full textWorld-leading filmmakers and scholars come together in Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension to offer the reader cutting-edge insights into how screen narratives work. This collection explores a variety of mediums (e.g. feature film, television, animation, video games) and how they have evolved. It also explores how major artists have innovatively subverted narrative conventions (David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Bela Tarr), and how academics from a variety of traditions (film scholars, philosophers and cognitive psychologists) have shed insight on screen storytelling from different disciplines.
Books on screen storytelling have traditionally fallen into two separate camps. This first is screenwriting manuals, which are designed to help the reader with story construction, building characters and writing dialogue, along with formatting scripts and finding agents. The second camp is books on film narratology, which aim to make the reader aware of the broad norms of moviemaking and how particular films relate to those norms, currently and historically. This collection is the first of its kind in drawing a bridge between the two domains.
Offering state-of-the-art surveys of narrative from internationally-renown researchers, theoreticians, and media practitioners, this collection is a key text in understanding contemporary research from a range of disciplines in a single, accessible resource designed to engage both novices and experts in the field of screen storytelling
Blending leadership philosophy and practice in the aid sector in South Asia
No full textLeaders of international humanitarian and development organizations (IHDOs) contribute to providing aid to many of the world’s poorest and most disaster-affected people in South Asia. Challenges they face include increasing demands for compliance, accountability, and transparency against the need to deliver on intended results and objectives. Leaders are required to provide vision, strategy, consistency, and security in contexts that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Constant changes and instability in the operational, political, and social environments in South Asia contradict traditional linear thinking and planning of programs and cycles. IHDOs, with their increasing regulations and procedures, and dwindling organizational space and time stymie innovation and creativity, while calling for increased yet potentially inappropriate professional standards to be applied against ground realities and human capital available. Diverse cultural dimensions must be accounted for including those of the country, the people, the organization, the team, and the leader themselves. Further, IHDO leaders must establish and nurture relationships with a multitude of stakeholders, aside from their teams. These include their organizational hierarchy and peers, donors, government representatives, clients, service providers, local civil society organizations, academic institutions, media, and their program beneficiaries; each relationship comprising its own nuances and consequences. Leaders must be versatile if they are to be successful, appropriately balancing the application of their characteristics and competences. For this, a new philosophy, theory, and practice of leadership versatility is presented that leaders and their IHDOs can promote and apply in their endeavors to face and overcome the above challenges in South Asia
Ecological Vision in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'
No full textThe 250th anniversary of the birth of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was celebrated in 2022. In recent times, one of his most famous poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (initially published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798), has gained increasing resonance as a proto-environmental text. It warns the reader, or listener (personified by the listener-within-the-poem, the Wedding Guest), that when humankind mistreats nature there are devastating consequences. In the age of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency, it is a poem that speaks to our time. This article considers this ecological interpretation of the text and its connection to other literary ‘texts’ across a range of media. It surveys how the poem’s semantic field, imagery and themes contribute to its meaning, and how contemporary readings show the impact of this context on its reception
Latin American Women's Documentary Cinema: Contexts, Processes, and Forms, 1975-1994
Full text linkFrom the 1970s, Latin American women began making documentary films with clear political intents. These films shed light on the precarious conditions that characterized women’s entry to the workforce and other labour struggles, on reproductive rights and women’s role in production and reproduction, and on the inevitable questioning of identity that results from migration and displacement. However, the historiography of Latin American cinema continues to ignore the legacy of these filmmakers. This thesis acknowledges and re-signifies women’s documentaries and reclaims their contributions to film history. Moreover, it provides a new lens through which to revisit the history of Latin American documentary while also adding to the scholarship on Latin American women’s filmmaking through both theoretical analysis and creative practice. In the written component, I propose three approximations to the study of Latin American women’s documentary cinema between 1975 and 1994. To do so, I have curated a selection of nine documentaries produced during these decades that illustrate some of the thematic interests, modes of authorship and production, and formal strategies and aesthetic devices employed by women filmmakers. Ultimately, I contend that this corpus of work was produced during a formative moment for women’s and feminist cinema. The analyses of these films have informed the making of the creative component. The short documentary Processing Images from Caracas traces the archive of activist, filmmaker, and photographer Franca Donda and the film collectives that she was part of, Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. It also shows how Latin American women’s documentaries and other relevant materials that could make up an archive of women’s and feminist cinema are at the brink of disappearance and foregrounds the urgent need to create such an archive
Tres aproximaciones al cine documental hecho por mujeres de América Latina entre 1975 y 1994
No full textA partir de la década de 1970, numerosas mujeres latinoamericanas comenzaron a utilizar el cine como forma de expresión artística y herramienta política realizando documentales que visibilizaron y denunciaron formas de opresión que, hasta ese momento, habían permanecido en el ámbito de lo privado. Como señalan Traverso y
Wilson, la bibliografía sobre el cine documental de la región es escasa (2014) y, a pesar de los esfuerzos por incluir documentales hechos por mujeres, se centra en el cine realizado por hombres.1 Con el objetivo de contribuir a la re-historización del cine latinoamericano desde una perspectiva de género, este artículo propone tres aproximaciones al cine documental hecho por mujeres de América Latina entre 1975 y
1994 a través del análisis de una selección de documentales