Senior living design
Traditionally, senior living centers have prioritized care over design elements. The reasoning behind this makes sense. Many (if not most) residents need active care, and designing to enable that care helps the residents get the most from their living situation.
Prioritizing care exclusively often comes with trade-offs. Care-centered design often fails to maximize social and shared spaces, leading to feelings of isolation, which are a problem for many seniors.
In fact, the CDC suggests that roughly a quarter of U.S. adults over the age of 65 are socially isolated.
Thankfully, design can help. Emerging trends use open floor plans and a mixture of private apartments and suites to allow for privacy while still promoting community and communal engagement in the center. Best of all, these changes do not have to compromise care at all.
Promoting social interactions and engagement
The easiest ways to improve social engagement in living centers is to create common or communal spaces. Many centers have done this to at least some extent over the years, but as you cater to interests and activities, design choices better foster social engagement.
For instance, many living centers have a common area with chairs, couches, tables and possibly a TV. This is a social space, and residents often take advantage, but with some deliberate changes, you can transform such spaces to bring about much more activity and community.
One example is to focus on social eating. Place dining tables where residents can eat together. Use coffee-shop-style designs to make grab-and-go food and drink more available. You can even use a community kitchen to host cooking classes or group cooking events — and that’s just the kitchen.
Gardens, gyms, walking paths, lawns (with lawn games), libraries, hobby or craft rooms and more options are available.
Now, catering to so many ideas proves challenging in most living centers. Space and finding may be limited. That’s where design really has a chance to shine. Multi-purpose rooms, efficient use of space, and clever storage can enable a single space to serve multiple roles. With this, you can cater to many interests even with limited space and break through isolation.
Design fosters belonging
If everyone lives in a self-contained space, they have less reason to interact. When living centers mimic suburban housing, it creates a sense of comfort and privacy, but it does little to break through isolation.
Use design to funnel people together on purpose. You don’t have to eliminate privacy. Private apartments are still fundamental to an overall design, but simply using open floor plans will bring people in contact with each other on a regular basis.
When design puts people together, physically, human nature can do the rest.
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