THE FUTURE PERFECT COMPANY
The Future Perfect Company supports and promotes creative businesses and has a focus on ageing through its flagship student design project, Designing for the Future.
Founded by former lawyer, Philippa Aldrich in 2009, the company has run the Designing for the Future project for hundreds of UK design students and supported many graduates and start up creative businesses through the DFF Network.
DFF subject of Housing LIN Viewpoint
I was delighted to be asked to contribute a Viewpoint piece by Housing LIN about design for aging and in particular to share my experience and some of the outcomes from our Designing for the Future project with Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton. Housing LIN is a professional network supporting over 5,800 people working in housing, health and social care to provide the latest policy, practice, research and innovation in housing with care for older and vulnerable people. The Housing LIN also has a particular focus on extra care housing due to its previous incarnation overseeing the Department of Health's
Shall we forget about the older consumer?
In October, I took part in a seminar organised as part of the ILC-UK and Personal Finance Resource Centre project on financial circumstances and wellbeing hosted by Brown-Forman to discuss findings around consumer spending. David Hayes from the PFRC presented new research exploring patterns of expenditure among older people which was then debated by an expert roundtable, along with broader questions surrounding the ‘older consumer’. How to market to older people is becoming an increasingly important topic as the UK’s population ages. A key issue to be addressed by marketeers is how to avoid the homogenisation of this group, as its diversity is often lost
How Mrs Snowball could hold the clue to digital inclusion
In all the talk about digital inclusion, it is perhaps surprising to discover that it was a grandmother from Gateshead who pioneered online shopping from her living room way back in the early 1980s. As part of a council initiative to help the elderly, Mrs Jane Snowball, 72, sat down in an armchair in her Gateshead home in May 1984, picked up a television remote control and used it to order the groceries from her local Tesco. "What we effectively did was to take a domestic TV in a home and turn it into a computer terminal," says Michael
Pigs trotters’ jelly or real “gummy” sweets, anyone?
Poppy Wilson St James is another of our "Designing for the Future" alumni and her final year health-related project is concerned with communicating relevant, but sometimes inaccessible facts about food in original and engaging ways. All very topical in the light of the various recent food scandals. I was particularly struck by the idea of the pig's trotter jelly mould. Historically, gelatine was created by boiling the bones of animals, especially pigs and cattle. Nowadays gelatine is still made from the hides and bones of cows and pigs but is industrially extracted. As highlighted by the recent horse meat scandal we are increasingly ignorant of
Will baby boomers choose to live in communes?
As people live longer, pension pots shrink and more families find themselves caring not only for their own children but also parents and grandparents, some sort of communal living seems inevitable for all of us. This represents a huge sea change in how we live in the UK. For people born after the Second World War, the nuclear family was often the norm. People moved out of the parental home as soon as they could and many moved away from their home town. The ubiquitous “modern executive detached” became the home of choice for the aspirant middle classes. People
Do we really want to be independent?
Much of the discussion around housing for older people centres around the notion of independent living. But while being able to stay at home is the aspiration of many, what if independence is not the right goal? We may not want to rely on others for our care but few of us relish being alone. And indeed the epidemic of loneliness sweeping through our older people is testament to that very fact. Rather than having to choose between home or care home, some innovative new projects are challenging the goal of independence, suggesting instead that we should be aspiring to a