Upcoming Events:

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Past Events:

56th Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG) Conference, November 2023

On 14th-17th of November 2023, Professor Evonne Miller, Dr Sarah Johnstone, and Dr Abbe Winter attended the 56th AAG Conference at the Gold Coast, showcasing the outcomes of the research project in the art display / exhibition space. While we were there we bumped into two of our research participants – Danijela and Juanita – both passionate advocates in aged care, whose stories were captured by Sam Regi as part of this project. In addition to displaying outcomes of the research project, we also had a DIY Found Poetry art table and tested out the Advocate card game with conference attendees.

Research Participant – Danijela, standing next to her portrait.	Research Participant – Juanita, standing next to her portrait.	Chief Investigator Prof Evonne Miller in her role as conference chair
AAG attendees testing out the Advocate card game in the art gallery space	AAG attendees testing out the Advocate card game in the art gallery space	Team member Dr Sarah Johnstone at the QUT Design Lab Booth
The DIY Found Poetry table in the art gallery space	Found Poetry gave attendees an opportunity to quietly reflect and process the often heavy, emotional, and confronting content of the conference presentations.	A selection of some of the amazing poems that were produced throughout the conference

Below are exhibition panels showing a selection of the project’s research outputs:

Bribie Island Nature Festival, October 2023

Artful advocacy: creating poems for impact – a workshop exploring narratives of ageing, aged care, nature, and climate change

On Friday 20th of October 2023, Professor Evonne Miller and Dr Sarah Johnstone coordinated a vibrant and inspiring workshop as part of the inaugral Bribie Island Nature Festival. In only 90 minutes, participants learned the hands-on methods of translating text into emotive and captivating poems. Participants could choose to focus on a key social issue (ageing OR nature/climate change), and then create a poem reflecting your hopes, dreams, and fears. In addition to developing poems, participants got crafty – experimenting with other found poetry techniques including concrete poetry, erasure poetry, and also the of illustration and collage to visualise their poetry – drawing on the meaning and symbolism contained in their poem.

Photos from the event:

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD) June,2023

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD) is commemorated each year on 15 June to highlight one of the worst manifestations of ageism and inequality in our society, elder abuse. This year’s event, held at Southbank Parklands, we shared the outcomes of our research project through a variety of engaging and informative formats over the course of the day, including:

Let’s Talk – Panel Discussion with Prof Evonne Miller and Sam Regi on the topic of Engaging the public with aged care through arts-based storytelling, chaired by Heather Wallace from Caxton Legal Centre Inc. & Lisa Hodgkinson.
Hands-On Creative Activities in the ‘Cuppa Tea Space’ – including:
- Game Session: ‘Advocate’ –A Game for People Who Care, facilitated by Dr Abbe Winter & Zoe Ryan
- Visualising Poetry – Using concrete poetry techniques to create visual found poetry, facilitated by Dr Sarah Johnstone
Exhibition Stand with opportunities to engage in an Augmented Reality experience titled ‘Creating Conversations’ facilitated by Niharika Shah, a letter writing activity called ‘Co-Respondence’, and a variety of creative outcomes from the research project including photographs, poetry, and artworks.

Photos from the event:

Melbourne Design Week – May, 2023

Workshop – Participate, Co-create, Advocate: Amplifying Voices for Aged Care Quality

Melbourne Design Week 2023 celebrates design in an annual 11-day program of talks, tours, exhibitions, launches, installations, and workshops across Australia’s design capital.

About the Workshop:

On Friday 19th May 2-23 several of our research team, comprising social and interaction designers, guided participants through hands-on experience translating policy submissions (from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety) into emotive and engaging found poems, integrated with visuals to become a collaborative digital art installation. This 2-hour workshop held at The Hangar, RMIT University, was held as part of Melbourne Design Week 2023 and comprised:

(1)a 1 hour facilitated poetry workshop that guides participants through the process of creating both found/erasure poems and original lyric poems about ageing and aged care,

(2)a 1 hour facilitated interactive visual design workshop which guides participants on subsequent visual interpretations of poetry snippets through collages from media images and composing text strings for machine language algorithms to generate imagery; with text and image subsequently being published (live) into a collaborative interactive artistic visualisation installed in the workshop space.

The event – at the intersection of social justice, policy, design, and art – was aimed at galvanising the public to engage with aged care, and our personal and societal stake in it. In 2020, the Royal Commission delivered highly distressing findings and responding to these is a singular opportunity to reform Australian aged care and redress the marginalisation of aged care residents—a vulnerable demographic whose voices too often go unheard. However, the stories of neglect, abuse and change shared are not resonating with the public in their current form. In this workshop, we shared techniques and outcomes to show how innovative art and design can provide older Australians with more visibility in aged care policy debates.

Watch a video of the workshop:

DMRC Showcase: Digital Display at The Cube | Interactive Posters

DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH CENTRE SHOWCASE: Digital Display at The Cube | Interactive Posters

About the Event:

This event, hosted by the QUT Digital Research Media Centre on Thursday 6th October 2022, featured cutting-edge research led by Higher Degree Research students and Early Career Researchers, spanning the DMRC’s five programs: Transforming Media Industries, Digital Publics, Computational Communication & Culture, Governing Digital Societies, and Digital Inclusion & Participation.

At this event researchers were given an opportunity to showcase their diverse and timely projects as digital interactive poster presentations on the interactive screens at The Cube, P Block, Gardens Point campus. As part of this event we exhibited the outcomes of the Media Analysis research.

Photos from the event:

Time to Listen:

Amplifying Voices from the Royal Commission into Aged Care through Art & Design

As part of the ‘Design for Change: Designing the world we want’ conference (11th-15th July 2022), we showcased the preliminary findings and progression of this ARC Discovery Project as part of an exhibition titled ‘Time to Listen’.

About the Exhibition:

In addition to presenting the initial findings from interviews with key stakeholders, and a large-scale media analysis of news coverage of the RC, Time to Listen demonstrates an early exploration of alternative arts-based methods of engaging with aged care stories, including art installations, research poetry, and digital interactive experiences.

As part of this exhibition, the Sphere was host to the first appearence of a new artwork by Jen Seevinck, titled ‘Not/Be Heard’ – an installation which visualises words of a witness from the RC, alongside exploratory sketches with found and concrete poetry, and experimental image generation using machine learning.

Attendees were also invited to participate in a Found Poetry Workshop creating found poetry with submissions to the Royal Commission combining collage and other visual poetry methods. Throughout the exhibition space were several mailboxes where people could ‘post’ a handwritten response to someone’s story contained in unmarked envelopes.