Ageing as design culture

Abstract

This paper discusses emerging themes related to design culture of ageing or in other words ageing as design culture. By looking into existing experiment and exploration practices from different countries on ageing and design, this paper summarizes outcomes from a full day international expert’s workshop. The main outcome is a need for a broader understanding of ageing that goes beyond the definition of ageing by means of age, deficits and needs. We introduce four main issues that emerged from our discussions in our workshop on how to deal with ageing as a subject of design experiments. These four themes can be considered as initial steps for building a framework for design culture of ageing. A theoretical framework of design and ageing could help designers to better understand the dynamic interrelations and different states of ageing. This discussion further can open up new creative spaces related to ageing as design culture.