Helen Hamlyn Design Awards Winners Focus on Ageing Population

From a telephone-based, shared interest social network to a bespoke palliative care service, RCA graduates and this year's Helen Hamlyn Design Awards winners have examined issues around social isolation, choices around end-of-life care and changing family structures.

With much of the Government’s focus on reducing the cost and burden of an ageing population on the state, issues such as these are often overlooked.

Professor of Design at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Jeremy Myerson, says, ‘institutionally, we’ve been slow to understand demographic change. There are more pensioners now than there are teenagers and it’s up to designers and architects to fight for a more inclusive environment, be it the ability to drive or die where you choose. What these awards do is not just offer a readymade service, but can influence prevailing thinking and offer suggestions as to how things could be.’