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Tomorrow’s Home 2050 – opportunities for you to get involved

14 July 2021

This innovative project will create an immersive and interactive space to imagine what home healthcare will look like in 30 years’ time.

Looking for current information on Tomorrow's Home?

Visit Tomorrow's Home 2050's webpage here

At Tomorrow’s Home 2050, audiences will explore and consider all dimensions of our future home lives. This will range from playful provocations about our future social lives, to inspiring examples of possible products and services to the home-healthcare technologies designed to facilitate healthy ageing and independent living. 

The project brings leading interdisciplinary researchers from UCL, designers and the public together to reimagine and realise a vision for future homes through an immersive multisensory space and interactive experiences. The initiative, led by Prof Rebecca Shipley (Director, UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering), Dr Mine Orlu (School of Pharmacy) and Marilyn Aviles (Tomorrow's Home 2050 Project Manager), is a recipient of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Ingenious Award for public engagement. UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering has partnered with design and engagement specialists The Liminal Space to create the exhibition at the Museum of the Home.

It builds on our strong record of research and engagement in the healthy ageing space at UCL including Age Innovation Hub, the launch of the CelebrAGE network and IHE’s Healthy Ageing Symposium

The themes Tomorrow’s Home will explore…

  • Domestic Devices -Which devices will we have in our homes for safety, comfort and convenience? What new engineering technologies will move into the home space?
  • Getting Close Up -How might materials and interfaces evolve to react to our emotions or actions, or connected objects sense what we need at home?
  • Being Yourself at Home -How will the home of the future influence our behaviour?
  • Relating to Our Spaces -How will Tomorrow’s Home change our relationship with our communities and wider environment?
  • Tomorrow’s Services -What impact will a more futuristic living space have on the other parts of our lives and society?
  • Big Ethical Questions -Will our homes be sites of surveillance or sites of support?

Tomorrow’s Home aims to provoke questions and explore new ideas in collaboration and conversation with the wider public around what the future of the home may look like.

Alongside the exhibition and as part of the Museum of the Home’s ‘Home Truths’ series, we are creating a programme of seminars and conversations pieces to explore and address these questions with members of the public and researchers.

Healthcare engineering community, this is your chance to get involved

Be part of the conversation

What new technologies may change the way we live, work and play in the home space? How might these help us live joyfully? Or live independently for longer in the home? How might these transform our relationship with what ‘home’ even means? How might we feel about increasing levels of monitoring? How might the collection of vast amounts of data about the way we live be used in ways we may or may not intend?

We invite you to be a voice in this conversation either through giving a talk in the ‘Home Truths’ programme of seminars. This can be online or in the physical Museum of the Home space through November-December.

We particularly welcome creative interpretations of what the home means, unusual angles to the conversation or the chance to hear from non-academic voices. If your research is co-produced with other groups, those with lived experience or external organisations we would love for them to lead the conversations too and be part of the seminar programme.

Interested? Email marilyn.aviles@ucl.ac.uk (Tomorrow’s Home Project Manager) with a brief description of (a) the theme you’d like to cover in a seminar (these can be connected to the themes above or something new), (b) how it relates to your research.

Workshopping the future – lead your own workshops in the exhibition space to dig deeper in conversation

If your research touches on some of the themes of Tomorrow’s Home, we are also open to exploring with you how you could use the space as forum for your research and/or public engagement workshops throughout November-December. We are happy to help develop these into our programme but you and your team would need to lead on these workshops and provide the resources you will need.

Interested? Email marilyn.aviles@ucl.ac.uk (Tomorrow’s Home Project Manager) with a brief outline of your ideas so that we can discuss it further.

Volunteer at Tomorrow’s Home 2050 with us and build engagement skills

We are looking for UCL researchers and community partners from outside of UCL to receive free training and build their engagement skills by volunteering in-person at the exhibition

These volunteers will spend some time at the Museum of the Home engaging with the various audiences attending. You will receive valuable public engagement training from experts before you volunteer, will build important communications and collaboration skills and will enhance your CV with an IHE letter and certificate recognising your participation.

Interested? Email Georgie Cade, g.cade@ucl.ac.uk (IHE Communications and Impact Manager) to register your potential interest and discuss it more.

Other ideas?

If you have any other ideas or questions we would love to have a conversation with you, so please contact marilyn.aviles@ucl.ac.uk (Tomorrow’s Home Project Manager).

For instance, are you working on a technology that could inspire future home-based healthcare technologies? Would you like to have this inspire the design of the exhibition? We’re open to hear from you.

If you’d be interested in attending the exhibition and its programme of events then stay tuned and we’ll be releasing more information soon. You can stay in touch with our updates by following us on Twitter at @health_eng or signing up to our monthly newsletter here.