Ageing Engagement: Improving the Elderly Experience in Kitchen

Being the most used rooms in any home, the kitchen has evolved for decades in response to older users’ inclusive interaction. Therefore, understanding how older users engage with kitchens helps designers address inclusion of the elderly by eliminating physical, social and cultural barriers. This study further elaborates previously developed inclusive kitchen design factors (Afacan and Demirkan 2010) by adapting the ‘Design Wheel’ model proposed by Clarkson et al. (2011) with a focus on observations of 40 Turkish older users’ kitchen needs. By creating personas and answering the four fundamental questions of the model (1. What are the needs? 2. How can the needs be met? 3. How well are the needs met? 4. What should we do next?), it aimed to gain more insight into an elderly way of thinking and acting in relation to the inclusive kitchen design. Depending on the findings of task analyses and observation of the participants, three personas are created and the three need categories with a total of 10 kitchen need attributes are listed. A mock-up kitchen environment is also created and tested with reference to these needs.