Portrait series – Comfort in Living
February 24, 2014
Imagine a helping hand strong and agile enough to assist you with the routine things you can no longer do yourself? That is just one of the prototypes developed at this year’s innovation camp by Comfort in Living.
“Who is Alma? What does she do everyday? What would she like to do and how can we help her?” asks Mathieu Rivière, senior industrial designer at Electrolux in Stockholm. He is pointing to a picture of a lady in her 70s. She is one of the imagined customers that designers, companies and innovators from the Comfort in Living-team, aim to please. The purpose of the project is to focus on product development for the comfort of living among the growing population of elderly people in the Baltic Sea Region. The project responds to the growing societal challenge of an aging population in Europe as well as in other parts of the world.
“It’s about feeling safe enough to be able to live on your own longer, but also about growing old with comfort and dignity,” says Lotten Svensson, head of the Comfort in Living project. So far the project has resulted in a wide variety of products. Polish researchers participating in the project have recently patented auxetic springs for furniture. By inserting the springs into chairs, sofas, or mattresses, the researchers claim to be able to relieve pressure on the back and spine as well as prevent bed sores. “It has the same beneficial effects as water beds but is cheaper and easier to implement,” says researcher Beata Fabisiak.
A special type of wood referred to as honeycomb is also used to produce furniture that is stable but very light and thus easy to move. But the biggest success of all stem from an event in July when 85 people participated in a one week Innovation Camp in Copenhagen. Teams of young designers, mentors and business representatives from 17 companies and seven countries were mixed and matched in cross-cultural teams. “It was a nice creative mess! A design workshop is a fantastic opportunity to get to know each other,” says Rivière. Svensson agrees: “It’s also a great way to test commitment. You have to fight towards a common goal, drag equipment around, sweat and then finally succeed together, to truly know someone. It’s easy to stay reasonably pleasant for brief periods of time when you can go home and be grumpy afterwards. But when you eat and sleep together you can’t hide that kind of stuff.”
At the end of five days and nights of work, prototypes had been designed for multi-functional kitchens, an interactive door helping users to remember things, and a helping hand that can be used to for example lift grocery bags, whip cream or hold a hair dryer. “The simple solutions are often the best,” says Svensson. Her favorite is the sliding kitchen prototype which enables users to gain easy access to objects by simply sliding movable counters back and forth. “If it’s difficult for you to move around in the kitchen, we have to find a way for the kitchen to move around you,” she says.
According to Svensson, elderly people frequently lose their apatite when cooking becomes too energy-consuming and ready-made meals too tedious. “By designing the right tools we can make it easier for elderly people to keep cooking the food they enjoy,” she says. Senior Designer Rivière prefers the adjustable kitchen designed in modules that can grow and change with your needs. “Elderly people are often scared to try new things. With the module kitchen you get a chance to build trust over time. People start by buying one piece and then add other pieces as they get increasingly comfortable with the concept. After a while their kitchen starts to reflect who they are,” he says.
In the future, Svensson hopes to extend the focus of Comfort in Living to also include Comfort in Work. “We will be working later in life. Many people in their 70s are still professionally active and this trend will only increase. But an older work force will place new demands on the work place. Small things like office lights, the size of keyboards and buttons, the support and flexibility of chairs and desks, will all have to be adjusted accordingly,” she says.
She also sees the need for a virtual aging laboratory where members can enter research data that is relevant for the 80 million people that populate the Baltic Sea Region: “There is a physical aging laboratory at MIT in the United States and most research in this field is conducted in the United States, but that data is not so relevant for the population in our region as our preconditions are quite different from the Americans,” she says.
But the area where she sees the most future potential remains the Innovation Camp which she hopes can be developed to become an internationally renown concept where participants first have to qualify in rounds of national contests to ensure the very best teams take part. “Here I see that we can really make a name for ourselves and come up with some great products in the process,” she concludes.
Written by Kajsa Norman
Photos by Torbjörn Lagerwall