Ageing. Bodies. Homes/City: Sizes > Capabilities > Movement

Jan 2017

 

From Summer 2015, the HKDI DESIS Lab began a collaboration with VTC Engineering Discipline on the “Ageing Bodies Study”. It was funded by the Strategic Research Area Working Group (Social Innovation for Ageing Population, SRAWG (INNO)) of Vocational Training Council. It is about body measurement and the ergonomic application of a safer bathroom in order to facilitate ‘ageing in place’. A pilot study of over 60 people, using full body measurement data, was collected and some preliminary design concepts for safer bathrooms were developed.

 

The action research part was entitled Drawing (by) Your Bodies which aims to encourage Hong Kong’s senior citizens to become more aware of their bodily changes through body measurement and visual representation of their body changes such as charts/documentations/and reflections. Our data collection process was designed in such a way so that older participants could be more involved; reducing the feeling of being measured like an object in a lab. They helped to collect a range of information from size (ergonomic data), users’ capabilities to movement.  After referring to traditional ergonomic data collection, we designed a Spirograph-like process to record each full body measurement instead of a numeric dataset. This enabled participants to relate and visually understand body movements and capabilities.