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Kitchen living in later life: Exploring ergonomic problems, coping strategies and design solutions

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-08-18, 10:33 authored by Martin MaguireMartin Maguire, S. Peace, Colette Nicolle, Russell MarshallRussell Marshall, Ruth Sims, J. Percival, Clare Lawton
The kitchen is an important area in the home serving many purposes both functional and social. It is central to enabling people to stay within their own homes in their later life. As part of a detailed study of ‘past’ and ‘present’ kitchen living, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 48 older people about their current kitchen and how well it met their needs. It was found that personal problems with reaching, bending, dexterity and sight were more likely to be experienced with increasing age while for specific tasks, ironing and cleaning created the most difficulty. The paper reports on coping strategies and simple innovations made by the participants to address the problems they experienced. A challenge for kitchen designers, manufacturers and installers is to think in terms of kitchens that are more flexible and adaptable to people’s changing needs.

History

Published in

International Journal of Design

Volume

8

Issue

1

Pages

73 - 91

Citation

MAGUIRE, M. ...et al., 2014. Kitchen living in later life: Exploring ergonomic problems, coping strategies and design solutions. International Journal of Design, 8(1), pp. 73-91.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by the International Journal of Design Solutions

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

Acceptance date

2013-07-05

Publication date

2014-04-30

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by International Journal of Design Solutions under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

ISSN

1991-3761

eISSN

1994-036X

Language

  • en

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