All Posts Tagged 'ageing' from Helsinki Design Lab

The HDL Studio on Ageing in about Five Minutes

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0300

This week we're posting the third and final studio recap video. If you've been following the previous weeks with Education and Sustainability, this is going to look pretty familiar.

These videos were created for parallel panel conversations at HDL Global 2010 so the original audience was only able to see one, thus the repetition was necessary to allow everyone to have the same introduction to the studio concept. Feel free to fast forward past the recipe section if you've already seen it twice!

If the animation has piqued your interest, the best place to find out more about the Ageing Studio is in the Dossier. Like the other Dossiers, you might want to start with the Challenge and Opportunity Space, which together outline the starting point for the studio, and then continue on with the Studio Summary which outlines where the studio ended their week together.

Currently we're hard at work trying to convert some of the "hunches" that the studio sketched out into prototype projects. More details as they emerge.

Photos from the Ageing Studio

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:40:00 +0300

Left to right: Inderpaul Johar, Marianne Guldbrandsen, Petri Lehto, Onny Eikhaug, Hannele Seeck, Alberto Holly, Emily Thomas, John Ruark.

Helsinki's Deputy Mayor Paula Kokkonen joins the studio for the friday review.

And many more here on Flickr. Photos by Ivo Corda.

On the ground in Jyväskylä

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:10:00 +0300

Yesterday was a whirlwind tour of Jyväskylä, which we visited to see a cross section of how one city thinks about its elders.

Welcome to Jyväskylä

The balance between the human and infrastructural/institutional presence at an individual's front door inside an assisted living facility... interesting.

What it looks like at 11pm in the summer when you're at 62° north.

Opening up Ageing

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:18:00 +0300

As Helsinki continues to warm up for the summer, we welcome a new group of guests who comprise our third HDL Studio, this time on ageing society. While the first two studios had relatively focused questions, this one is more open-ended. Around the world there's a lot of attention towards the coming "silver wave" of retiring Baby Boomers whose quantity, diversity of needs, and consumer orientation will put new demands on welfare systems. The challenge we face now, and the focus of this studio, is to develop an understanding of the relationships within this knotty issue—How do the pieces fit together?

Is ageing a health issue or a social issue? Is it a question of environments, isolation, mobility, independence? Is ageing just about the elderly? The nature of the challenge exists somewhere at the intersection of these many issues.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs expanded to a torus of actors.

Christina and Ankki, two Aalto University students who have been doing preparatory research in advance of the Ageing Studio's arrival, struck on an interesting way to map this web of needs and the groups responding to them. They started with Maslow's Hierarchy of needs in one dimension and the different scales of activity and support—from private, to city, to national—in another dimension. The key actors related to ageing are then slotted into this matrix. The result looks something like this draft:

The network of actors related to ageing in the city of Helsinki. In progress.

The visualization itself makes the gaps very apparent and the act of drawing becomes a process of discovery. More as this work develops.

And now, a hearty welcome to our HDL Studio on Ageing:

Onny Eikhaug. Programme Leader, Design for All, Norwegian Design Council
Dr. Marianne Guldbrandsen. Chief Designer, Design Council, London
Alberto Holly. Professor Emeritus, University of Lausanne
Inderpaul Johar. Co-founder, Zero-Zero Architecture Research, London
Petri Lehto. Ministry of Employment and the Economy, Helsinki
Dr. John Ruark. Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University
Hannele Seeck. Adjunct Professor, University of Helsinki
Emily Thomas. Founding Director, Aequitas Consulting

If you want a peek into the life of the studio, follow #HDL2010 on Twitter where Inderpaul Johar is actively posting. Tomorrow we're heading to Jyväskylä for a full day of site visits as the studio continues to immerse themselves in the challenge.