Involving the elderly in the design process: a participatory design model for usability, safety and attractiveness

This work presents a conceptual model involving the elderly users into the design process by means of participatory design sessions, where the expertise of designers and the real requirements and opinions of elderly end-users, related to how objects, environments and equipment should be designed to allow ageing in place are collected and filtered through Quality Function Deployment matrixes. Two different design sessions are done for the groups of elderly end-users. The scope has been limited to the design of doors and door handles for domestic use. In the first design session, the end-users are asked to talk about and to ‘design’ the doors and door handles of the house they want to age-in, considering all their possible requirements, needs, particular wishes, and ideas. This is a combination of brain storming, scenario building and unstructured interviews. The output of the first session provides a basis to design the mentioned products. The second session consists of presenting to the same group of end-users the various design concepts created, according to the output of the first session. The concepts are again discussed, remarks, preferences, and new ideas collected to further improve the design.