“How many people?”
“Including two assistants, it’s ten in total.”
Actually, some participants on the list didn’t show up. It’s fine. We are used to this situation. If someone makes a questionnaire for activities that university students in Hsinchu participated in one year, activities related to aging might account for only 9%. However, no matter how many students come, we are indefatigable. The speaker guided the students to understand more about human’s physical change through aging, and the corresponding reactions. What gratifies us is, students’ responses and feedback show that they had many take-aways. Few students are better than no one. Again and again, time after time, there will be more and more students, we believe.
§ Turn this unpleasant and excluded issue around §
With exploded information and various choices, unless it’s a relevant topic of their study subject, for young people, aging issue is actually not something matters for them. Especially in Hsinchu, the youngest city in Taiwan, when mentioning resource allocating or issues discussing, aging issues are relatively ignored. Living in the same place with the rare intersection or less opportunity to understand each other, sounds not that nice for urban development.
As the project team explored the target, we found that health and sub-health elders get less attention than those who need medical treatment. However, prevention is important, we should put the intervention at a more forward age. Therefore, this project sets up the scope of “promoting health” for “mature age”(a relatively broad definition) people. Based on the team’s profession: service management and design, sports fitness and training, music in health care, system and device research and development, the project invited students to contribute their expertise. We hold various activities to arouse students' interest and resonance. It’s an urgent first step, and it takes time to fallout. We’ll keep working on this.
§ Bring out a fresh imagination of healthy life §
How to promote health for mature people or elders in reality?
Promoting health positively should “effectively” change the behavior of those who lack training concepts or don't do exercise regularly. Thus, we design a 12-class precise exercise course with the considerable arrangements, such as (1) conduct pre and post physical tests to observe the performance of training; (2) measure blood pressure before and after the course and monitor heart rate while training. (3) Let the participants build the ability and habits of managing health by themselves. (4) Also, to ensure that coaches and assistants can catch everyone’s condition in the real time. (5) Coordinate with music to create the atmosphere or rise up their emotions; (6) search for the matched place in consideration of comfort, safety, and accessibility; more importantly, we keep the user in mind, apply user research and service design for course, keep close contact with the coaches, and continuing to revise the course.
After several phases of the course, the result of pre- and post-physical tests shows a training effect, and we found out that doing exercise does change lives. Elder students start to know how to question fake information, to observe body change, and to consider protein as an important nutrient. They even buy soy milk to drink right after every training class! They now understand that having muscle can be the symbol of beauty and health instead of just being skinny.
“Fortunately, I have this course. My friend and I were looking for a gym before, but we didn't dare to go, because we thought it wasn’t suitable for us,” says the elder who signed up for the exercise course. The new exercise course has just opened for registration, and it is full in an instant. We hope that after establishing the course modules and management systems, we can provide it to more people to use in the future, so that more people can cultivate correct training concepts, effectively improve physical fitness and health, what’s more, to have more self-confidence, and dare to dream that they never thought before.
§ To interact and co-create based on understanding §
““We seldom have the opportunity to interact with elders in daily life, and we don’t know where they are,” students said. In fact, the generation gap is not from excluding, instead, it’s from less understanding and interacting. What leads to the result? The unsupportive environment? Not match the imagination of activities on campus? Too little promotion?
Under the condition of without interrupting the field, avoiding to make elders play just passive roles, and arousing students' interest, we try many ways to make students and elders understand each other more and interact in fun more. On one hand, we make a change for elders through exercise courses. On the other hand, we transform the efforts and positive characteristics of elders, hoping that students will be interested in aging issues, knowing the importance of it, understanding the behavior of older adults, and participating in their respective professions further. From the perspective of research and design, we co-work with university classes, guide students to discuss and think, including: let music-majors students create soundtracks for the exercise course; organize activities or workshops of the role playing, and put elders and students together in discussion to practice empathy. In addition, we also operate a co-creation community and encourages students to take the initiative to propose learning topics, such as assisting students in conducting special research and organizing exchange activities.
Regardless of physical or mental health, we hope that in the future, based on understanding and empathy, everyone will work together to manage a more friendly environment, allow interaction to occur naturally, and put forward new ideas for an ageless, common healthy life.