A collaboration between the Royal College of Art and the Masbro Elders Project, Making Worlds with Others began with a simple question: what happens when two generations sit down together and make something?

Over a series of workshops, RCA students paired with elderly participants from the Masbro community - drawing, painting, collaging, writing, and experimenting with generative AI. The prompts were open: share a memory, describe a favourite trip, draw what happiness feels like, tell us about your childhood. What came back was unexpected in the best way. Stories about Babycham and the Twist. Maps of Jamaica drawn from memory. Poems written to grandchildren. A penguin at the London Zoo that a son once loved.

The students listened, documented, and helped shape what the elders made - guiding them through Procreate on an iPad, scanning hand-drawn pages, sitting with the awkward silences until they became something else. Some participants had never made art before. Some had exhibited. All of them had something to say.

Reminiscing - the art book produced from the workshops - is the record of those exchanges. Portraits by Lidi sit alongside mixed-media collages, handwritten notes, and AI-generated images that participants made themselves. Together, they make up something harder to name: a shared space between strangers, built out of time, attention, and a willingness to show up.