#31 Mental health - what does architecture have to do with it?
Innovating housing for older adults and subjective wellbeing - a Belgian perspective
Why the talk is inspiring?
How would you like to live when you get older? What makes you feel at home and happy in the place where you live? At the end of 2021, the HOUSE research project started to work on tackling these questions, focusing on older adults living in Flanders, Belgium.
Indeed, we are all getting older. We not only age in our homes, but also in our neighbourhoods, and as members of society. Ageing is one of the most important global challenges, and as such, it inevitably impacts the housing sector and housing policy. Research shows that older people spend about 80% of their time at home, and that for 40% of them these homes have become unsuitable. Specifically looking at Flanders, Belgium, currently, the number of options for possible housing concepts is rather limited, and these do not respond to the large, heterogeneous group of older people.
For these reasons, the HOUSE project is conducting research into innovative housing concepts for current and future older people: we aim to positively influence their subjective wellbeing. Subjective well being is defined as what a person feels and thinks that makes his or her life desirable regardless of how others see it. Within the HOUSE project we therefore do not speak of ‘ageing in place‘, but of ‘ageing well in the right place‘. In her lecture, prof. Petermans will discuss insights and results of the HOUSE project.
You can find more about the project HOUSE here: https://house-research.be/.
2024
Speaker
Ann Petermans
How the speaker is exceptional?
Ann Petermans (PhD, Architecture) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, Hasselt University, Belgium. Her research interests concern designing for experience in designed environments and for diverse user groups, design for subjective wellbeing and how (interior) architecture can contribute in this respect.
RECOMMENDS TO READ
Design for wellbeing: an applied approach
Ann Petermans, Rebecca Cain
Why the book is worth reading?
This collection of articles discusses the design of products, technologies, environments and services which is open to the influence of the pursuit of wellbeing. Despite the trouble of defining wellbeing or happiness, authors emphasize that one of its aspects, i.e. intentional activity, is accessible to architects and designers. This means that the silent companions of our everyday life – our environments and their elements – should facilitate or even encourage that which seems valuable and meaningful to the owner or visitor of the space, and not merely support their physical survival. For this reason the design process for the needs of the aging and the ill radically differs through methods of co-design and participatory methods from the very inception.