The "Aging in Place" Kitchen Experience
This experiential redesign is the result of a project-based Engineering and Design course. The Quality of Life and Technology Center, which sponsored the project, asked three engineers, a business major, and a designer to create a kitchen that would allow its users to "age in place" (implying adaptability). Rather than proposing a solution that asks elderly users to operate outside of their comfort level with entirely new and unintuitive products, this solution simply alters existing products such that they become more manageable with age. The final layout includes a vertically and horizontally operating dishwasher, a lower, deeper fridge with a rotating shelving unit for easy access, cupboards that slide up and down on tracks along the wall, and an oven that operates through a side slot door to prevent lifting heavy dishes. The final deliverables included a 3D sketch up of a possible kitchen layout that depicted each redesigned appliance, individual renderings of a fridge, cupboards, oven, and dishwasher, and a specs package report.
Inspired by the idea that kitchen space is mobile, these cabinets were designed to optimize free space in the kitchen. They slide up and down depending on the needs of the user.
Smaller oven that can be operated either by the front or the side. Heavy dishes can slide into the slot on the bottom tray to minimize heavy lifting. Eliminating the heavy door minimizes upper body stress
Aimed to minimize bending over and maximize the speed of unloading the dishes.
The interior of the fridge combines a lazy susan top level with a set of clear, easy sliding drawers on the bottom. The lazy susan promotes easy access to smaller, on-the-go food items.
The Age-in-Place fridge accommodates users with differing heights with a pull-out folding step found in the base section of the fridge. Larger, easy to grip handles are ergonomically more appealing to someone experiencing arthritis.
Each appliance went through multiple iterations. We wanted to identify which features could be added, improved, or eliminated to best suit the needs of our users, and do so cost-effectively.
We created our objective tree to help us strategize what values we were striving to improve about the current kitchen.
Process: Envisioning The Next Kitchen
The Project was completed over the course of four months, with three Milestone Design Reviews spaced between that time frame. We met weekly with the Quality of Life and Technology representative, Randy Eager, to walk through each step of the process. We submitted biweekly reports and status updates comprised of Gantt charts, morphological charts, weighted objective trees, and pairwise comparison charts, each of which helping to develop our project and determine how we can add value to the next kitchen. We combined the quantitative data gathered from weighted charts with the qualitative user research findings to create our final design. Below are examples of the different kinds of thinking and processes we used to define and approach our problem.
Our final solution was a synthesis of our quantitative approach (using the weighted charts) as well as our qualitative user research findings. We presented the design concept to the Quality of Life and Technology Center at the end of the semester. We provided the company with an interchangeable system of components designed to age with the user. A photoshop mock-up and 3-D renderings can be viewed below.
Solution
Next Steps
The largest challenge we faced with the kitchen project was maintaining a larger vision of how the entire kitchen would come together while simultaneously zooming in each feature. There was a constant back and forth throughout our process, meaning that as we iterated through each feature of each appliance, we would periodically take a step back and reason through how well this feature would fit in with the others. One of our first iterations of the oven required a redesign of counter top space in such a way that it would no longer be intuitive as a counter. As soon as something stopped making sense or was no longer intuitive, we approached a new direction. Even though we finalized our design by picking one style of each appliance idea, it would have been interesting to push the concepts further and demonstrate different possible styles and layouts that could work in congruence with our overall concept.