Designing supportive and culturally sensitive spaces for older women’s food-related activities

As people grow older, they experience declining capacity that disrupts their independence. Older adults' ability to maintain their independence in conducting various everyday activities is key to successfully aging in place. Among the different everyday activities, older adult's ability to manage food is central to enabling them to remain mentally and physically healthy. This is particularly relevant for older women who are more likely to live alone or give family care.

The Food-related activities Engagement and Adaptation Study (FEAST) aimed to examine the challenges and adaptive behavior of older women when conducting food-related activities such as food preparation, cooking, eating, and cleaning in their residential environments. Through interview and photo-video elicitation methods, the study explored the aging in place experience of older Indonesian women and older Indonesian immigrants living in the United States to understand common challenges to maintaining independence and the influence of sociocultural context on food-related activity settings.   

Mapping challenges and implications to the built environment design

There were a variety of challenges that older women encountered when carrying out food-related activities. Some of these challenges were rooted in age-related physiological and cognitive changes. Many older women noticed that they get tired easily, so they find it difficult to engage in an activity that requires them to stand up for a long time. Additionally, standing up too long can cause pain, especially in the lower body area, such as the legs, knees, and hips. Problems with the lower body also create challenges in reaching things in the bottom drawer or fridge, which is commonly done, especially during cooking or cleaning. Similarly, placing things in the overhead cabinet is also challenging, especially for older women who have a risk or fear of falling. Beyond physical challenges, older women faced cognitive challenges when they needed to remember or monitor multiple things when cooking.

Despite the various age-related challenges that they encountered, older women continue to adapt their behavior to stay engaged in cooking activities so that they can continue caring for their loved ones by providing nutritious and delicious food. Older women’s strategies to remain engaged in food-related activities were varied. Despite the variety, the built environment plays a critical role in ensuring the safety and comfort of older women when engaging in food-related activities. While everyone ages differently, there were common patterns of age-related challenges that can be minimized through a more fitting design of residential environments.

Learning from participants’ adaptation strategies, the following are some examples of design strategies to support food-related activities:

1.     Provide a chair or space for a chair nearby the stove and kitchen counters with feet support and backrest to minimize the pain when standing too long

2.     Provide foldable or light chairs that participants can easily access when they need to store or get something from the bottom storage area

3.     Include storage systems that are not too high or have a mechanism to be pulled down hence reducing the need to use stairs or stools to reach up

4.     Incorporate visual and auditory connections between the kitchen and other rooms for easy monitoring from different parts of the house

Food and meaning:
Importance of continued engagement with food-related activities

Beyond learning about the challenges and adaptive strategies to navigate age-related challenges that disrupt older women’s engagement with food-related activities, this study also explored the meaning of food-related activities in participants’ life. For older women, food is their language of love, and the kitchen is the heart of the home. As a language of love, participants ensure that they provide nutritious and hygienic food. Often, they are key in the health management of their family members who have allergies or chronic diseases. Food is also a language of love that ties the community together. Through the food they serve, many participants play an important role in initiating discussions and gatherings to generate movement and change in the community. Such interaction with food makes the kitchen the heart of the home. The kitchen is not merely a space for cooking. In fact, it is the place where many important decisions are made, and various interactions and activities take place —food-related or non-food-related—that are central to household dynamics.

Design for aging should also be aware of the sociocultural background of users. While this study focused on community-living older women who live in single-family houses, townhouses, and condos, design strategies can also be applied to inform the design of senior living communities. Older women’s connection to cooking should not be completely disrupted after they move to a senior living community. Designers and operators can still provide opportunities for older women to engage in food preparation activities that are a simplified version of cooking. For instance, having a public kitchenette area, preferably in the heart of public areas, where residents can have simple cooking activities with staff or fellow residents. Staff can create creative programs that introduce meals from residents’ diverse cultural heritage. The kitchenette can store basic seasonings or ethnic spices that residents can use to personalize their prepped meals to match their tastes. Allowing older women to remain involved in the process of preparing the food they consume contributes to their sense of autonomy. The opportunity to take part in food preparation and to add a personal touch to their meal is important not only to older women’s physical health but also to their sense of identity and belonging.

Understanding older women's challenges and adaptive behavior in food-related activities is key to developing design interventions and support that fit older women's personal and contextual needs. Through this research, I have been able to unravel the layers of challenges to maintaining independence. This article highlights some of the preliminary findings, as data analysis is still ongoing (per November 2022). Moving forward, it is important to further explore this research topic with others from understudied populations in different cultural and geographic settings to expand the understanding of supports for aging in place cross-culturally.

Acknowledgment:

This study was funded by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design for Aging Fellowship 2021-2022. Special gratitude to the mentors: Suzanne Barnes, Emi Kiyota, and David Banta, for their mentorship and guidance throughout the fellowship program.