London's design museum hosted an exhibition "New Old" which "explored the potential for design and designers to enhance the experience of our later lives."
https://designmuseum.org/whats-on/pop-up-exhibitions/new-old
Some of the responses were...
A SOCIAL ROBOT FOR COMPANYIn collaboration with the Israeli startup Intuition Robotics, Behar also recently designed ElliQ, a robot meant to combat loneliness among the elderly. It’s a cute little companion that helps you stay social as you age. Voice recognition makes it easier for non-tech-savvy seniors to navigate the internet, learn, and stay engaged with family and friends.
Designed by PriestmanGoode for New Old, the Scooter for Life is nothing like your average mobility aid. With a sleek pouch in front for storing shopping bags or groceries, the push scooter’s base also folds up so that it can be easily carried on a bus or taken into a store or apartment. With three wheels, it’s much more stable than your average children’s scooter, and it also has the option of adding a seat or a small motor. With this kind of mobility device, public transportation becomes much more accessible for older people who may not be able to walk the distance to a station or bus stop.
Social Oven
"Central Saint Martins' graduate Magda Sabatowska has devised a cooking kit to help isolated elderly female residents of housing estates in Poland socialise with their neighbours."
Social oven is great in that it is beneficial to more than the user. The designing and packaging are very well made and is a project which is feasible and realistic for us students to achieve.
Other countries
It's important to acknowledge the assumption that all elderly have the same path...either in a rest home or living in their own home (alone or with a partner) when this is a very western custom. There are many customs around the world where their elderly are treated completely different from those in Western countries.
Below are some statistics from 1998 (Statistics NZ) relating to Pasifika household types.
- Most common household type in NZ contained three or more generations (49.2%)
- Followed by two generation households (43.6%)
- Pacific people more likely to live in a household with extended family members than the general population.
- 41% of Pacific people lived in extended families compared to 23% Maori, 23% Asian & 6% European people.
How grandparent customs compare across the globe.
- CHINA – Common for 3 generations to live together, with the grandparents being the primary caregivers. NOTE: A recent study discovered that Chinese grandparents are overfeeding their grandchildren and letting them skip household chores. This is leading to obese children.
- KOREA – Grandparents are the primary source of childcare, but they’re paid for their services. A Korean Women’s Development Institute survey found that 73.8% of caregiving grandparents would quit if they could.
- INDIA – Cultural customs vary, but in Northeast India it is common for married couples to live with their parents (Bengali women move in with their husband’s family, and Khasi men with their wife’s). This is meant to increase the wives’ fertility rates.
- SPAIN – Grandparents are basically full-time, fill-in parents. It’s uncommon for them to make wages – or get much respect. One out of every eight grandparents spend more than 9 hours a day in a care-taking role.
- FILIPINO – It is extremely important for grandparents to be treated with the utmost respect. It is common to see grown-up grandchildren greet their grandparents by kneeling before them and pressing their hand to their foreheads.
Style of booklet artist models/ Inspiration
For this booklet we are wanting something that is timeless. Something that emphasises that we are speaking about the elderly. We are talking about a melancholic subject and so a dynamic, vibrant style is not what we are looking for.
- Our main inspiration was the idea of a book/novel. Books are something that are timeless and suit our concept of connecting youth and elderly as grandparents often read to their grandchildren.
With this inspiration, we started to add "chapters" to split up the segments and are adding a contents page at the beginning. The calm centred layout of a novel is also dictating our layout and cover.
For our illustrations, we are resembling old etching style drawings...
Reminds me of scientific drawings you would see in old books.
Old novels often only featured the title on the cover.
A serif font was also an obvious choice for us.
Although we are inspired by vintage simple design of old books we still want it to be a modern, well-designed version of this so we didn't try to exactly resemble an old book with texture etc... just suggest it.
Red is a timeless yet emotive colour and could add a more vivid and eye-catching element.
Some modern editorial inspiration...
Swirly chunky serif is elegant and eye-catching.
Duotone is simple yet eye-catching.
A modern twist on a vintage theme and imagery. Again, simple monotone/duotone colour palette.
A spread with lots of relevant photos would help to gain empathy for the elderly.
Ideally, if we had more time we might go and find a slightly textured paper that is off-white and even bind the booklet with string or another method to gt a more authentic feel.
