2022 Spring - Aging & Design

In 2022, June He launched the Aging & Design course at Drexel as a community-based design studio that connected students with older Asian immigrant adults in Philadelphia. The course focused on participatory and empathic design, asking students to move beyond designing for users and instead design with them.

Through a sequence of storytelling, co-create, and co-design workshops held at community centers such as SEAMAAC, students listened to older adults’ life stories, explored cultural perspectives on aging, and collaboratively developed early design concepts and prototypes. These interactions helped students confront assumptions about aging, develop intergenerational communication skills, and build deeper empathy through hands-on collaboration. The course concluded with a public exhibition at Drexel’s URBN Center, where students presented co-created solutions that addressed the social, cultural, and everyday needs of older adults in the community.

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Outcome

In 2022, the outcomes of the Aging & Design course were reflected in a range of student prototypes, process books, and public presentations that documented the collaborative design process. Working closely with older adult partners, student teams developed solutions addressing everyday needs and community experiences, such as a subscription box for community centers, an age-friendly raised gardening bed for community gardens, a birdhouse with integrated planting pots, and a public park concept designed for older Asian adults in Chinatown. Alongside the physical prototypes, students produced detailed process books and posters that documented their research, interviews, ideation, and iterative prototyping. These materials demonstrated how storytelling, participatory workshops, and continuous feedback from older adults shaped the final concepts. The projects were ultimately presented in a public exhibition, allowing both the community participants and the broader university audience to see the collaborative outcomes of the course.