difference by the way we design them, by the way we connect to the existing developments. What is also quite important to think about is to make sure that within the project that you are doing, there are different types of spaces in which the commercial and non commercial activity can coexist. What that means is that you don’t always feel that you have to pay or you have to spend money in order to come and use this space. There are spaces where anybody can just feel very free to go to, and that’s actually very much about giving back to the community. Because when we talk about a community, it is a group of people who may not want to always spend money every time you enter into your building. They may just want to be there to perhaps find a quiet place to read a book or to be walking the dog or to meet up with friends. So we must design spaces for this kind of very casual and informal activity to take place while not attracting undesirable social behavior. That is how we can give back to the community. But again it takes a lot of thinking to find that balance.
Q:
St. Joseph Nursing Home was one of the first Intergenerational facilities in Singapore. Were there any learning points from designing the Intergenerational facilities in the Home?
A:
St. Joseph Nursing home is run by one of the Canossian Sisters. It is a religious organization and it is very much in their ethos to care about the dignity of the elderly. So, they are very progressive in exploring ways to achieve that intent.Bringing children into their environment in what we sometimes call intergenerational care is something that is quite unheard of in Singapore because of the way nursing homes were previously set up and operated. This is not something that is commonly seen, in fact it has never been seen before. The equipments like those in the playground were specially designed for somebody sitting in a wheelchair and a child to play side by side. There was one that is a basketball hoop that
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somebody on the wheelchair can throw at and there is also space for a child to do that together. Then there are things that see-saw and all that, which are done solely for the purpose of bringing different generations together. Other than that, there are also spaces where we allow activities that sometimes are quite large in nature because if you have young people coming, children coming in and you have elderly, who are a little bit less mobile, you actually need to create a lot of space for these activities to take place because of maneuvering space and all that. So that kind of spatial consideration is important. We also learnt that we have to be careful in training or educating the young people on interacting with the elderly. For instance, what the sisters do in St. Joseph Home, when they bring the young people to visit the seniors right is to tell them that you need to sanitize your hands before you go and visit uncles and aunties. That is very different from telling them that, “Okay, now that you have visited uncles and aunties, go and sanitize your hands”. It has a completely different effect. If you ask them to sanitize their hands before that, it shows that they need to be caring for the uncles and aunties and cannot spread any viruses to them, because we do not want them to get sick. But if you ask them to sanitize their hands after, that means you are telling them that there may be some diseases that the uncles and aunties might have, so you better sanitize after you have visited them. So we learn small things like that, sometimes may not be architectural in nature. But I think design is not just architecture. Design goes beyond that. As a designer, you need to think of how a space is used, how you program the space, and how you work with the users. What kind of mindsets do you want to help them to cultivate? I think all these are actually very important parts of the overall success of the space, not just the hardware itself.