Designing with Stories: Women's Retirement Transitions and the Co-creation of Supportive Interventions

Policy and public health often frame retirement as a single, uniform milestone, overlooking the diverse social, emotional, and material realities women encounter. This thesis investigates how women navigate the transition to retirement and examines how narrative, human-centred design, and co-production methods can generate more responsive forms of support. The study engaged women approaching and beyond state pension age, alongside community stakeholders, through narrative interviews, co-design workshops, and a story completion study. Dialogical narrative analysis provided a consistent interpretive lens across all phases.

Phase One interviews revealed retirement as both disruption and reorientation, highlighting care responsibilities, financial uncertainty, shifting identities, and evolving uses of time. Analysis produced narrative typologies that captured different ways women positioned retirement in their lives. In Phase Two, these typologies were refined and used to shape design framings, composite characters, and co-design workshops. The workshops generated three prototype interventions: a Retirement Café, a Buddy Scheme, and new approaches to physical activity. Phase Three tested the functionality of these prototypes through story completion, where participants imagined themselves within designed scenarios. This revealed the value of socially safe, emotionally affirming, and contextually relevant support, while also showing where ideas felt less plausible or difficult to imagine in real-life contexts.

Empirically, the thesis demonstrates how gendered life-course patterns and cumulative inequalities shape retirement, challenging one-size-fits-all models of ageing. Practically, it shows how narrative typologies, framings, and co-created prototypes can inform tailored interventions, offering foundations for policy, community, and public health strategies that reflect women’s realities. Methodologically, it advances dialogical and imaginative approaches that elicit unspoken needs and provide a way to test early-stage concepts when real-world piloting is not feasible. Collectively, these contributions reposition women’s voices at the centre of retirement research and open new directions for designing interventions that address the complexities of later life.