The financial and economic challenges of housing provision for an ageing society

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to assess the critical financial and economic issues associated with the provision of adequate housing in the UK in the face of current and future demographic change. Design/methodology/approach The review is based on an investigation of the current state of preparedness of the housing market and its various stakeholders based on recent reports and secondary statistical evidence. Findings The findings emphasise the need for a multi-faceted approach to tackle the challenges that need to be addressed. Unless measures are initiated to influence the market, the requisite increase in the stock of appropriate housing in the face of rapid demographic change will not occur. Originality/value The value of the study is that it identifies the issues based on the current state of provision and makes recommendations for meeting the challenges arising from these issues. These recommendations have strong implications for policymakers and other stakeholders

Contemporary Design History

This chapter posits that design history, as a set of approaches, perspectives, and techniques, offers a powerful mode for undertaking histories of the contemporary. It suggests that the approaches and perspectives possible in the history of design – attention to lived experience, materiality, and the everyday; an understanding of experience as interface with artifactual environment; and a concern with the making and experience of the artifacts, environments, and experiences that shape our physical and emotional interaction in the world – might provide an effective net for catching and seeing that history. Combined with methods for communicating histories that activate such an understanding of affect as a designer would – or in collaboration with artist and designers – the chapter proposes that design history offers a powerful script for compiling and communicating histories of the recent past, and for relating those histories to decision‐making now. The intention is to invite historians working with contemporary questions and material to engage with design historical approaches, and to articulate avenues, tools, and challenges for researchers and students in design history, research and practice. To this end, the chapter draws primarily on evidence and literature in design history, with reference to methodological reflections on contemporary history. The chapter builds also on findings from British Academy-funded research (Design History of Now, 2013-14) that sought to identify, test, and develop tools and perspectives for contemporary design through scoping studies, literature review, workshops and structured discussions with design historians, curators and researchers. The chapter is organized in three sections. The first explores the temporality, scope, and subjects of contemporary design history. The second discusses methods, perspectives, and challenges for undertaking contemporary design history effectively. The third argues for the potential of contemporary design history, as an aggregation of approaches and perspectives, to contribute to history practice and public knowledge alike

Care in a time of austerity: the electronic monitoring of homecare workers' time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a 'time of austerity', care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time-consumers and homecare workers as resource-wasting time-takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self-sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low-waged care work are required to eschew a rights bearing, present-tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of 'care' into those of 'time consumption', and by emphasizing the virtue of present-tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time-monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers' pay