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Ageing-in-place is the preferred way of living for older individuals in an ageing society. It can be facilitated through architectural and technological solutions in the home environment. Dementia poses additional challenges when designing, constructing, or retrofitting housing facilities that support ageing-in-place. Older adults with dementia and their partners ask for living environments that support independence, compensate for declining and vitality, and lower the burden of family care. This study reports the design process of a demonstration home for people with dementia through performing a literature review and focus group sessions. This design incorporates modifications in terms of architecture, interior design, the indoor environment, and technological solutions. Current design guidelines are frequently based on small-scale studies, and, therefore, more systematic field research should be performed to provide further evidence for the efficacy of solutions. The dwellings of people with dementia are used to investigate the many aspects of supportive living environments for older adults with dementia and as educational and training settings for professionals from the fields of nursing, construction, and building services engineering.
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Buildings with innovative technologies and architectural solutions are needed as a means of support for future nursing homes alongside adequate care services. This study investigated how various groups of stakeholders from healthcare and technology envision the nursing home of the future in the presumed perspective of residents, care professionals and technical staff. This qualitative study gathered data via ten simultaneous monodisciplinary focus group sessions with 95 professional stakeholders. The sessions yielded eight main themes: person and well-being; relatives and interaction; care technology; safety and security; interior design, architecture and the built environment; vision and knowledge; communication; and maintenance and operation. These themes can be used for programming future nursing homes, and for prioritising design and technological solutions. The views between the groups of stakeholders are to a large extent similar, and the personal needs of the residents are the most prominent factor for practice.
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Urban areas provide a promising context for upcycling due to the concentration of consumers and existence of bulky waste resources. Hence, upcycling initiatives emerge across European cities, but little is known about their manifestations. Building on interviews with twenty-four stakeholders from the urban upcycling ecosystem and three focus groups sessions, a morphological model was created with internal and external business model characteristics to analyse a database of 172 collected Dutch urban upcycling initiatives in the furniture and interior sector. The morphological analysis led to eleven urban upcycling manifestations with distinct business model characteristics that make up five generic categories and a landscape of urban upcycling which facilitate future research into the topic. A research agenda to study quantitative implications, regional differences, collaborative experimentation and scaling strategies of urban upcycling is proposed. Practically, the typology may facilitate policy makers and practitioners to create, scale or accelerate urban upcycling initiatives.
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How and where can Dutch design entrepreneurs find work in Germany? This was the question DutchDFA put to the research team at Inholland University of Applied Sciences in February 2010. But the researchers took a different angle, and generated unexpected data, revealing patterns, and valuable new insights into practicing design and architecture abroad.
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The design of healthcare facilities is a complex and dynamic process, which involves many stakeholders each with their own set of needs. In the context of healthcare facilities, this complexity exists at the intersection of technology and society because the very design of these buildings forces us to consider the technology–human interface directly in terms of living-space, ethics and social priorities. In order to grasp this complexity, current healthcare design models need mechanisms to help prioritize the needs of the stakeholders. Assistance in this process can be derived by incorporating elements of technology philosophy into existing design models. In this article, we develop and examine the Inclusive and Integrated Health Facilities Design model (In2Health Design model) and its foundations. This model brings together three existing approaches: (i) the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, (ii) the Model of Integrated Building Design, and (iii) the ontology by Dooyeweerd. The model can be used to analyze the needs of the various stakeholders, in relationship to the required performances of a building as delivered by various building systems. The applicability of the In2Health Design model is illustrated by two case studies concerning (i) the evaluation of the indoor environment for older people with dementia and (ii) the design process of the redevelopment of an existing hospital for psychiatric patients.
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We need mental and physical reference points. We need physical reference points such as signposts to show us which way to go, for example to the airport or the hospital, and we need reference points to show us where we are. Why? If you don’t know where you are, it’s quite a difficult job to find your way, thus landmarks and “lieux de memoire” play an important role in our lives.
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The “Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology” publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities. (This book is a reprint of the Special Issue Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology that was published in Healthcare)
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210,000 tons of textile waste is produced in the Netherlands every year - that is equivalent to 350,000,000 pairs of jeans. There are opportunities to use this waste stream as a resource for new materials in a circular economy, however. One such new material is the biocomposite RECURF. This material was developed within the Urban Technology research programme at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and consists of a combination of non-rewearable textile fibres and a bio-based plastic. The BiOrigami project sought to explore and develop architectural applications for this new circular biocomposite. Combining Japanese origami with digital production technology, BiOrigami explores possible functional, flexible applications of the biocomposite in interior products with high experiential value for use in circular-economy architecture. Origami techniques give the material important characteristics, making it more constructive and flexible with enhanced acoustic qualities. The use of digital production techniques enables serial production, which could be scaled up at a later stage.
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Ageing-in-place is the preferred way of living for older individuals in an ageing society. It can be facilitated through architectural and technological solutions in the home environment. Dementia poses additional challenges when designing, constructing, or retrofitting housing facilities that support ageing-in-place. Older adults with dementia and their partners ask for living environments that support independence, compensate for declining and vitality, and lower the burden of family care. This study reports the design process of a demonstration home for people with dementia through performing a literature review and focus group sessions. This design incorporates modifications in terms of architecture, interior design, the indoor environment, and technological solutions. Current design guidelines are frequently based on small-scale studies, and, therefore, more systematic field research should be performed to provide further evidence for the efficacy of solutions. The dwellings of people with dementia are used to investigate the many aspects of supportive living environments for older adults with dementia and as educational and training settings for professionals from the fields of nursing, construction, and building services engineering.
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