Textile-led Design for the Active Ageing Population

Jane McCann, David Bryson

• Publisher: Woodhead Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857098788
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Materials Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Despite the world's aging population, suitable clothing for the older community is a largely neglected area. This book considers the needs of the growing number of active older people and investigates how recent developments in textiles, fibres, finishes, design and integrated technology can be deployed to serve this group and improve quality of life.

Part I provides an understanding of the active aging population by considering the group's experiences of and attitudes towards clothing and reviewing the barriers to their adoption of new wearable technologies. Part II focuses on the needs of the older population, including effective communication with designers and the age-related anatomical and physiological changes that designs should consider. Part III reviews design requirements and processes, and finally Part IV reviews the manufacture of suitable apparel, with chapters on suitable textile fibres, balancing technology and aesthetics and wearable electronics.

• Summarises the wealth of recent research on attitudes to clothing amongst the active ageing population
• Looks into how their aspirations can be investigated and appropriate apparel designed to meet their needs
• Examines design and manufacturing issues, including ways of accommodating physiological changes with age and the use of wearable electronics

Part One

Understanding the active ageing population

Outline

1. Technological culture and the active ageing: a lifetime of technological advances

2. Clothing, identity, embodiment and age

3. Attitudes to apparel amongst the baby boomer generation

4. The importance of colour in textiles and clothing for an ageing population

5. The adoption and nonadoption of new technologies by the active ageing

1

Technological culture and the active ageing

A lifetime of technological advances

D. Bryson University of Derby, Derby, UK

Abstract

This chapter looks at the changes in technological culture through reflection on the author's personal journey and experience of technology from early manual methods through to increasing use of computers for photography, teaching, and learning. The implications of the multiplicity of changes and their impact on the active ageing are discussed along with the different types of reactions to changing technology. The chapter is very much designed to help new designers, as digital natives, realize the changes that the active ageing have lived through and how this needs to be taken into account with any textile-led designs for the active ageing. However, I also hope others, as either long-term active agers or like myself recently joining the active agers, can see how their journey mirrors or has had similar transitions, if in different workplaces or subject domains, to mine.

Keywords

Active ageing; Aliens; Cultural; Digital; Immigrant; Integrators; Native; Technology; Transitions

1.1. Introduction

In an age of rapid textile and technological innovation, we are now at a point when electronics are becoming embedded into textiles and garments, not just as novelties but tried and tested and ready for mass production. It is important, therefore, for designers to understand the challenges and limitations, in terms of the usability of the technology, from the perspective of the rapidly growing ageing community (50+).

This chapter aims to provide an overview of the technological changes that have taken place during the lifetime of the active ageing from the perspective of a personal journey highlighting the changes that have taken place but also looking at the effect of these changes on working practices and living patterns at the time, now and in the future. My experiences, in the workplace and in education, have led me to contribute to cross-disciplinary research and education through enhancing design students’ understanding of human anatomy and physiology, technology, the development of interactive learning materials, program development, and the co-editor’s earlier book Smart Clothing and Wearable Technology.

There have been many authors who have looked at the changes and identified the types of people inhabiting this new world as (1) digital natives, those who have grown up only knowing this new digital world of the past 20 years; and (2) digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001), those who have lived through the changes of the past 50 or so years of rapid change. These changes are not just about availability of technological devices but how working practices have changed and the impact of these on how we go about our daily lives.

As a personal journey, the transitions I have gone through in my career will be different from others growing up at the same time. Hopefully the reflection and thinking about the impact of the changes will be similar to others even if readers who are digital natives find many of the ways we used to work incomprehensible or, as students have expressed it to me, “Just plain weird.”

1.2. Learning and teaching

What we experience in school, college, university, and after in work greatly influences personal directions for both good and ill. The transition for me came full circle as I moved from work as a medical photographer back into education, so learning and teaching and what has occurred in terms of changes is equally part of my working life as well as my formative years.

1.2.1. Transitions in technologies

The transition in technologies is most noticeable in retrospect from using logarithm tables and a slide rule at school for any calculations. We only got to use a manual calculating machine for one day, so the main choice was to use the slide rule (Slipstick, Figure 1.1). King’s School Worcester did build an extension onto the gymnasium to house a computer donated by Metal Box Co. Ltd while I was doing my “A” Levels, with the whole of the computer needing a massive air-conditioned space.

At university, one student had a new calculator in the first year, 1973. In 1976 for an anthropometry project, measuring the head shapes and stature of medical students, the initial calculations were done using Fortran. This calculating machine had a limit on the number of steps, and first you had to load all the steps and then the data you wanted to analyze for regression and correlation. Similarly, the first programmable calculator I bought in 1979 (Figure 1.1) to make calculations easier still required programing before inputting data (Toth, 2012).

A requirement for university was definitely a good set of colored crayons, alongside pens and pencils, whether initially for the geological diagrams and then for embryology, with stages in growth and development illustrated by Professor David Sinclair once I had changed to anatomy. I copied from blackboard or greenboard to paper, and often rewrote so I could read what I had written.

Figure 1.1 Top at angle, Thornton Slide Ruler. Bottom, Casio Programing Calculator FX-501P. Photographer: David Bryson.

There were a range of audiovisual technologies, even if they had been around for a long time: the overhead projector, epidiascope projecting diagrams and radiographs from anatomical texts onto the screen in the anatomy dissection lecture theater with its steeply raked seats at Marischal College, and sets of stereo photographs of dissections that could be viewed with a 3D Stereo Viewmaster (Whiting, 2009). For teaching practice, it was more using the overhead projector and acetates. For creating handouts, it was a Banda machine rather than a photocopier, with the smell of alcohol coming off the sheets from either handwritten or occasionally typed originals for learning activities and handouts.

Training as a clinical photographer at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff it was very much conventional technologies for the student trainees with the PET computer and other devices restricted to the Head of Department, Professor Ralph Marshall. Indeed while working as a medical and medicolegal photographer, a computer was very far from a necessity, as manual equipment still worked and was more affordable than computers (see Section 1.3 for changes in Photographic practice).

Before desktop computers, there was a distinct development in typewriters, as technology moved from manual to electric, with work for copying in photography being typed with an IBM golf-ball typewriter with Baryta paper and Helvetica font, and then moving on to electronic computers, or really just an electric computer with a small amount of memory and a one line digital display. There was then a transition to typewriters as word processors before computers with printers attached took over.

1.2.2. The impact of inclusive design and technology on learning and teaching

“Scientists have discovered that digital natives’ lifelong exposure to technology means that their brains are developing differently. Educators are beginning to understand that reaching them requires a new style of education that accommodates the ways in which these students learn. Blended and hybrid learning programs offer powerful benefits in reaching and challenging digital natives” (Rudi, 2011).

Initially back to teaching, first the part-time HNC in Medical and Scientific Photography at Berkshire College of Art & Design and then the BSc(Hons) Biological Imaging at the University of Derby, traditional technologies were used, with an overhead projector with acetates. A computer soon became a key tool to support communication as well as a tool for developing learning materials that with time could overcome one of the barriers to learning—that of needing to have the lecturer in the classroom to be able to listen to and view what was to be learnt.

The aim of inclusive design for learning has become more feasible with technology allowing multiple ways to access the same information. For example, PowerPoint slides as a ppt file or slides saved as a pdf for viewing before, during, or after a lecture or session; videos of lectures as screencasts that can also be listened to as podcasts; handouts as notes, and a series of lecture notes specific to modules brought together into a pdf file or even a course book or booklet.

The difficulty is that all of these are possible, but it is unlikely given time constraints that every possible alternative would be available, so a subset of these is more likely, e.g., screencasts, slide handouts, and links to further resources including quizzes and learning tools or interactive presentations, screencasts, and collated lecture notes. The flexibility of being able to make different materials can leave the lecturer unsure which is the best combination, and many developments can only take place over time as materials are built on and developed further year after year.

The onus on digital immigrants to cope with the requirements of digital natives is for many a step too far and for others a challenge to use the new technology to enhance learning.

Developing active learning materials requires lecturers to use models for learning that are more intensive and absorbing for the student. This was always the best way to learn, but the accessibility to information to back-up and support this style of learning was not as accessible as it is now. Flipping classes where lectures and materials are online and classes are either for practical learning, debates, cases, problem-based learning, or discussions, is going back to experiential learning, and any questions can be asked of the lecturer supervising or looked up online while working in the class.

The move from walking the shelves, to hardwired, to mobile shows the change in accessibility of research material and resources that has reinvigorated experiential learning. ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• The Textile Institute and Woodhead Publishing
• Copyright
• List of contributors
• Woodhead Publishing Series in Textiles
• Part One. Understanding the active ageing population
• Part Two. Understanding and researching apparel needs amongst the active ageing population
• Part Three. Apparel design requirements for the active ageing population
• Part Four. From design to apparel for the active ageing population
• Index