LINK TO... NEWS: COMBINING BEAUTY AND FUNCTION - TO BEAT STIGMA

Combining beauty and function - to beat stigma

Danielle Kutchel speaks to a Canadian company that’s challenging traditional notions of what home mobility equipment should look like.

Humans are drawn to beautiful things – but when it comes to home mobility products, we tend to prioritise function over form.

Capella Design approaches mobility from the perspective that both elements can, and should, be prioritised.

Patrick Glinski is chief strategy officer and co-founder at Capella Design, and said the company’s philosophy is simple. “At Capella, we reimagine home mobility products as beautiful furniture and accessories. And the real reason that we do that, is because of our own lived experiences.”

Both Glinski and his co-founder, Kaly Ryan, have watched family members experience mobility challenges and also have a strong belief in the power of design and aesthetics.

“In both of our different situations we went through experiences where our families effectively rejected home mobility devices because they were afraid of how they would stigmatise them and how they would impact the aesthetic look of the spaces,” Glinski said.

Ryan is an award-winning furniture designer, while Glinski has spent several decades researching and understanding the lived experience of people with chronic diseases as part of a consulting firm.

Putting their skills together allowed them to find an answer to the question: if people don’t like the mobility devices currently on the market, what would they prefer instead?

FORM OVER FUNCTION

Typically, Glinski said, mobility devices are installed to help someone overcome a functional impairment. When these products are designed, they aren’t usually assessed in terms of their emotional context and how they might fit within a home. Capella takes a different approach.

“We look at the home as a reflection of your identity,” he said. “If you take these functional things that commonly would have been stainless steel, and you put them into these spaces, they’re instantly incongruent with the space. They don’t harmonise properly and because of that, they stick out like a sore thumb and people notice them.”

He said when users notice these clinicallooking objects it can make them focus on the negative aspects of their experiences.

He recalled a job in a previous role where he had visited a lady at her home, which had grab bars along the main hallway to help prevent her from falling.

“What she explained to us was that we were the first people she had let into her home in many years, and it was because she felt so embarrassed by the situation that she was living in because of the way these things look,” he said.

The visit stuck in Glinski’s mind, and was reinforced as he watched his mother and father go through a similar experience with Parkinson’s disease.

“As a family weren’t comfortable introducing all these objects that just further reminded my parents of this really difficult situation that they were in.”

INTENTIONAL DESIGN

Capella Design is “intentional and thoughtful” about what products it chooses to design, Glinski said.

As a starting point he and Ryan, visited medical design stores to find out what products were in demand, like shower chairs and grab bars. It then works with a community of occupational therapists and older adults that it has built over time, to understand the aesthetic challenges and issues with the product from the perspective of those who use it.

The designers then consider different materials and forms that can be applied to change the meaning of the product.

It results in products like Capella’s grab bar, which is housed in a picture frame – disguising it and ensuring it fits within the normal aesthetics of a home.

As Glinski said: “a grab bar is unfortunately a stigmatised product, but a picture frame is something that’s present. It’s there all the time and nobody ever calls it into question. We’ve used that ‘hiddenness’ of it to hide the function of [the grab bar], and it totally changes people’s relationships with the product.”

ACCEPTANCE

He said the reaction from the community has been “heartwarming”. Although Capella was originally started with the elderly community in mind, many customers with disability have joined the fold since it was founded in 2023 and have enthusiastically helped guide the company to create products that help them.

“They’re so thankful that somebody is tackling this issue,” Glinski said. “People have a deep emotional connection to these products, so going through the process of doing co-design with the community and also regularly soliciting feedback on the products, you hear how introducing products like this that are thoughtfully and aesthetically designed totally opens up an opportunity for people to accept things they wouldn’t have accepted before.”

He said close to half of all home mobility product recommendations go unfollowed, and stigma and aesthetics are two contributing factors in people’s decisions to ignore the recommendations.

“What we first see when we [take] the design to the community is usually surprise, shock and joy that we’re even getting started on this as a problem. You can [install a product] and there’s no trade-off involved – it’s just a beautiful object that provides function.”

JOINING REMARKABLE

As a recent startup, Capella was given a helping hand when it joined the Remarkable Accelerator program. Remarkable is an accelerator designed specifically for innovators in disability technology, so it was perfect for Capella.

Glinski said it gave them the structure to think about how to launch the business and how to serve the disability community better.

It has also connected them to other business founders who are now “lifelong friends”.

He said Remarkable ‘got’ Capella’s products and ethos from the start, and helped encourage him and Ryan in their product design journey.

The journey isn’t over though, and Glinski said Capella is gearing up for further success.

It has already launched four products: a stability mug, a grab bar frame, a side table and a shower seat, and the founders have a long-term aspiration to be a lifestyle brand in the accessible product space.

“In order to do that, we know we need products that are available for every room in the home,” Glinski said.

Along with a focus on designing more products, Capella is working on building its community in various sectors – people who can provide their own perspectives on those products and where the need is.

“We want to see a change. And if, at the end of the day, people have better, beautiful, accessible design options as a result of the work that we’ve done, then we will be very happy,” Glinski said.

“We are looking for a distributor to sell in Australia to keep shipping costs low.”