Creating Socially Integrated and Sustainable Communities that Value Their Elders
Although these questions are so simple, yet I found it quite challenging as we progress our projects. My new year’s resolution is to keep asking these two questions to maintain our focus on our grassroot initiative. What can Ibasho do to improve the life of elders that no other groups can do? What can architecture field do to prepare for aging society that no other disciplines can do? Does anyone have suggestions??
Dear Friends, Happy New Year! We in the Ibasho family wish you all the best for a healthy and happy 2013, and look forward to an exciting year ahead! As we look back at 2012, we have much to be grateful for, especially the support and encouragement we have received from supporters like you. And it has paid off! We started Ibasho in 2010 with just a few people but great passion and a belief that we can make a difference. And we have already made meaningful progress and captured the attention of communities around the world that are grappling with the universal question of how we can all age with dignity and […]
“It’s not just throwing money at the problem. The idea is to ensure that the standards are respectful of the customs and traditions of the community.” Desmond Tutu One of my favorite organization is The elders, and I just read an article “Desmond Tutu campaigns to end child marriage.” http://www.theelders.org/article/tutu-promotes-campaign-end-child-marriage After reading this article, I cannot stop thinking about the way in which we can tap into the valuable resources that elders in the world can offer to be a part of the solution of this problem. We have enough elders with wisdom and experience who can mentor young individual. Although one can only make a small contribution, the sum […]
Many academic literature and articles suggest the importance of “multi-disciplinary collaboration” to create an innovative care/environmental solution for facing our aging society. I do agree upon the approach, however, theorists tend to forget to address the real issues in a real world situation. After working on projects outside of academia, I have learned that “Theories are beautiful things, but real world is not as orderly as theories suggest… ” None of the theories warned me “there are some people who just do not get along.” When dealing with “experts” may add more complexity, because they have such a strong and different worldview. As a result, collaboration effort can easily turned […]
We all know that most older adults would like to live at home — after all, why wouldn’t they? I know I would. As a result, the people who work in long-term care for elders strive to create places that feel like home. But what is a “perfect home”? In long-term care, we try to create a place that is efficient, clean, and safe, with everything we need always accessible. But in our own homes (at least in mine), things are often inefficient and not necessarily clean, and it’s not always easy to find what I want. So why do we still want to live at home, where things are […]
I had a wonderful meeting with Bhutan project team and a monk from Bhutan in the first day of my visit in Singapore. While I was quite exhausted by the long travel, I was so glad to spend the time with them. During our discussion, the Bhutanese monk shared his thoughts regarding caring for elders in Bhutan. He truly hopes that this project will initiate reducing the suffering of people who have no roof over their head, no food to eat, and no clothes to wear when they get old. He described his ideas with using the term “compassion” Then, I realized how fortunate I am to exercise my thoughts […]
For three weeks in 2003 I lived as a nursing home resident while I was a graduate student in architecture. I was studying the impact of the physical environment of nursing homes on the everyday lives of the people who lived and worked there, so I checked myself into a facility in the Midwest as a young woman suffering paralysis on one side of my body. My stay there was crucial in the formation of my beliefs about what goes into making a first-rate nursing and rehabilitation facility, both in terms of the physical facility and the care that residents receive there. It was a personal experience from which I […]
When I visited a nursing home in Japan with my friend, he said “This place is comfortably messy. It makes me feel at home.” Being in the living room in this unit (10 elders live in one unit–total of 8 unites in the building), I felt so comfortable. It was also clear for me that elders in the space were completely relaxed. I was tempted to take a nap with the lady who were peacefully sleeping in the white sofa in the living room. This organization gives certain amount of money for staff members in each unit to decorate their unit with the elders. As a result, every single unit […]
I had a nice Japanese lunch with my friend in Singapore this weekend. She is a traffic engineer who helps organize transportation systems. Talking with her was quite an eye-opening experience, and so was the drive she took me on afterward through the city. She explained about the “street furniture” such as signal lights, benches, guard rails, road signs, crossing paths, and so on, pointing out that someone had to plan all the elements we see and usually take for granted in the streets we travel on. The planning is based on accumulated knowledge from research and extensive observation of traffic patterns, which are different in different cultures. The process in […]
I recently befriended a 79-year-old Japanese person, and I am so excited. It started when my friend in Chicago called to say: “I am with a Japanese person who do not quite understand English. Because he is thinking about making a large furniture purchase, I would like to make sure that he understands what I am explaining to him. I don’t think he understand English well enough for me to be comfortable. Can you help me?” What a kind person my friend is… In few seconds, a Japanese elder started talking to me on the phone. I immediately knew he was from my region because of the dialect he spoke. […]
I attended the “new aging” conference at University of Pennsylvania over the weekend and left there with a lot of thoughts. This conference organized a series of inspiring sessions with amazing speakers. They were not the typical speakers in aging conferences, and gave me an opportunity to learn different perspectives of design for aging. The clear distinction between the stylistic architects and me was that I tend to look at the housing for elder issue as a holistic view, which means that I start by talking to the people who will live and work there to find out what they need rather than starting with a preconceived idea about the […]
Building homes for elders in Africa and Bhutan is exciting, yet challenging as well for many reasons. First, communication with locals in these areas can be somewhat frustrating because we are so used to the fast pace in our culture. We sometimes forget that their communications are mainly based on meeting in person, instead of using texts or e-mails as we do here. They prefer to talk on the phone or speak in person, which means that things move at a much slower pace than to what we are used to. Maintaining non-virtual communications is a great approach, in a sense, because we are trying to preserve their cultural values. […]