Introduction

Today, designing with only the young and fit as target users and buyers of homes is a narrow and short-sighted approach. Designing with the needs of later life in mind extends consumer choice and widens the potential client group – which makes good business sense and provides a challenge to architects and designers. Older people do not generally become more mobile and active than they were when younger, but a product or element designed to suit an older person will generally be just as useful to a younger person.

In Britain, decisions about the standards, planning and design of social, low-cost or rented housing have rarely been made in consultation with the people who are going to live in them. Such decisions have almost always been made by housing professionals, managers, developers, architects and planners. Statistics show that few of these professionals are women, have serious disabilities or are from minority ethnic groups. They are also unlikely to have experienced old age and may be unused to conducting and combining many of the everyday routines of housework and childcare. But this has not prevented professionals from designing housing without finding out what people's different needs are, or how they might like to use the space(s) within their homes. As a result, there are many examples of social housing in which the design and layout create problems and inconveniences for the people who live there.

One of the objectives of recent project and research work has been to demonstrate to housing providers that people's differences – such as their levels of income, culture, ethnicity, age and mobility, and whether they have responsibilities for children or other dependants – create different priorities for them.