20 October 2023
Rica Teo, City Developments Limited
In the recent ULI WLI SG Insider Series, Ar. Ong Ker Shing, co-founder of Lekker Architects, was invited to share more about her award-winning publication entitled “Hack Care: Tips and Tricks for a Dementia-friendly Home” which recently won the illustrious President’s Design Award 2023 Design of the Year. This session was moderated by one of the WLI SG Steering Committee members, Mdm Fun Siew Leng, Chief Urban Designer of the Urban Redevelopment Authority and was hosted at PGIM (Singapore) Pte Ltd located at CapitaSpring – which was also one of the six projects that won the President’s Design Award 2023 and have also earned the ULI Asia Pacific Excellence Award 2023.
Ker Shing is a designer and educator, co-founder of Lekker Architects, and Associate Professor (Practice) and BA Architecture Programme Director at NUS Department of Architecture. She is a registered Architect, with Masters degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD. Ker Shing was granted the prestigious Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship in 2002, included in the third edition of the “20 Under 45” series organised by URA, and at Lekker, won the President’s Design Award of the Year in 2015 for The Caterpillar’s Cove Childcare and Development Centre and again in 2023 for Hack Care: Tips and Tricks for a Dementia-Friendly Home. Ker Shing sits on the Advisory Board of PSM, Singapore, and the Council of Singapore Institute of Architects. With such a robust experience in the field, Ker Shing is uniquely positioned to speak on the topic of pragmatic and human-centric design of a dementia-friendly home as well as share more about how she is actively pushing boundaries for a more progressive design which is quintessential for a country that is facing an increasing ageing population such as Singapore.
Ker Shing began her session by setting the context and emphasising the importance of addressing the pertinent issue of a growing ageing population in Singapore. She highlighted that one in four (or 23.8 per cent) of the population will be made up of senior citizens by 2030. With dementia as a common syndrome destroying the nerve cells and damaging the brain over time, this normally results in a non-reversible deterioration in cognitive function amongst seniors. Therefore, the importance of caring for these seniors in a dignified and steadfast manner to make lives better for them is crucial. With this, Hack Care, through creative, affordable, and practical ideas, democratises and facilitates inclusive design with each thoughtful hack. The book inspires the global design community to look at dementia beyond the usual staid ready-made solutions. It embeds a powerful message of normalising dementia – positioning it not as a strictly defeating problem but as a prompt to act, adapt, and create a better experience of daily life through “hacking”. Finally, the book proves thought-provoking by opening a much-needed deeper debate as to how a complex societal issue such as dementia may be tackled.
Ker Shing continued by sharing the inspiration and conceptualisation process of her book. Through aligning her personal life and work life, Ker Shing was able to find a common ground between both aspects which enriched her personal experience with her family as well as her professional experience as an Architect. Ker Shing was determined in pushing boundaries to see how and what exactly can design do to help people – especially seniors with dementia. She mentioned that during the discussion with the stakeholders, there was a moment of serendipity where the topics and issues of furniture not being suited and spaces not being ideal for seniors with dementia surfaced. She also cited that the success of her previous book entitled “A Different Class Preschool Spaces Redefined” sparked ideas for a version that is specifically focused on dementia-friendly homes. Ker Shing knew from the get go that she wanted this project to be in the form of a book which she believed would be able to travel quickly and spread ideas globally to reach a broader audience base. Another reason was her observation of people generally being intimidated by design but nevertheless loves to browse through design catalogues for inspirations. With all these serving as an impetus, Ker Shing conceptualised her book in 2016 in collaboration with Lanzavecchia + Wai and the Lien Foundation.
Using current available dementia design guidelines as a backdrop and starting point, Ker Shing identified that most of the available guidelines were merely high-level generic ideas, albeit important and relevant, which are hard to comprehend in terms of what it means or how to specifically customise the solutions to help seniors with dementia adapt their homes to make it dementia-friendly. She underscored the importance of a familiar home environment to these seniors as they spend the majority of their time at home. Thus, adapting the home to make it dementia-friendly would enable these seniors to retain the sense of familiarity within the same space and prevent triggering a shock due to a drastic and sudden change in the home environment. Based on the gaps identified, Ker Shing’s book presents immediately practicable and contextualised human-centric design ideas to improve the way people can care for seniors with dementia.
During this journey, Ker Shing conducted interviews with caregivers, medical practitioners, and elderly residents to solicit their views, thoughts, and experiences so as to make the book more relevant and relatable to carers. She and her team also visited furniture stores to critically assess the functionality and usefulness of common daily furniture for seniors with dementia. This was essential as these seniors spend most of their time doing simple tasks and living a sedentary lifestyle so it is especially important for them to be comfortable and able to go about their normal routine with as little assistance as possible. With this, Ker Shing and her team tweaked and modified certain elements of common household furniture such as a chair and tested out the products with seniors with dementia to obtain feedback. The hacks in Ker Shing’s book also presents an unusual twist to common household furniture where she puts forth an alternative to use objects differently from how they were designed to be used. One example was how she repurposed a kitchen chopping board into a fidget board which aims to introduce and integrate familiar items from the past to retain dexterity for these seniors. Ker Shing also embeds these dementia-friendly designs into the centre of family life to provide “seamless” and “incognito” assistance to seniors with dementia and enable them to feel confident and independent. With dementia being subjective as everyone’s progress is varied and unique, it is absolutely critical to tailor the solutions as deemed fit. Hack Care aims to empower carers to tweak everyday items and think about designing for seniors with dementia as being about caring, designing, and adjusting the home as an ongoing process.
During the Q&A segment, our moderator Mdm Fun posed the first question on some of the challenges Ker Shing faced during this journey. Ker Shing candidly shared that the entire project took much longer than expected to complete. Despite wanting to make an impact fast, she was limited by time and space and preoccupied with many other commitments. However, this was a topic Ker Shing was deeply passionate about and experimenting and researching into understanding the illness set a clear context for an intervention that is targeted and useful. As such, the end goal was clear and stakeholders remained confident despite the long process.
Another question posed by one of the audience members was on observations or principles of planning and delivering public spaces. Ker Shing answered that there are a lot of assumptions that public spaces are merely a physical provision. However, she posits that it is about designing with the seniors in mind and actively thinking about ageing. One key issue is reading social cues between different generations as there is increasingly a disjunction between how different generations read social cues. Ker Shing opined that this is something within reach for designers where they can consider when designing for spaces through interviewing various groups of peoples and thoroughly understanding the intention of public spaces.
The next follow-up question from another audience member hinges on the key takeaways from nursing homes and how the learnings can be translated and implemented to commercial buildings. Ker Shing responded that there should be a strong integration where commercial developers should endeavour to embed their developments (e.g., condominiums, retail malls, offices) into the neighbourhood to enhance connectivity and seamlessness of the precinct with the residents. In this way, residents and passers-by are able to become more involved in the space and in the process encourage intergenerational ties and promote inclusivity within the society.
The final question posed from one of the audience members are the steps moving forward on how Ker Shing plans to leverage on the success of her current book to continue developing in this area or explore other related topics. Ker Shing was optimistic and is currently in thoughts about crowd sourcing hacks and informal ideas from the wider online community to develop an inventory for the public to rely on as a useful online resource tool that is easily applicable and accessible for all.
In conclusion, through this book, Ker Shing hopes to share that solutions do not necessarily have to be grandiose or architecture-related in nature. Instead, it should be simple, practicable, and easily adaptable for everyone. And more importantly, harnessing the synergy of work, life, and play can create positive outcomes and should be embraced.
Members are also encouraged to read a publication by ULI on Later Living: Housing with Care guide which is available on Knowledge Finder.
ULI Singapore and its Women’s Leadership Initiative Steering Committee thanks Ker Shing for her generous time and insights on this topic. We are dedicated to increasing both the number and visibility of more women leaders throughout ULI’s vast network. As part of this mission, our program of work welcomes the inputs and involvement of all ULI members, not just women members. WLI Singapore mission objectives can be found here.
If you wish to be a Champion of Change, we encourage you to pledge your commitment here.
A limited supply of “Hack Care: Tips and Tricks for a Dementia-friendly Home” is available for distribution. To request a copy, please send an email to [email protected]. Copies will be distributed on a first-come first-served basis, while stocks last.