Developing a framework for effective communication with older people

Abstract

Communicating with older people is more challenging because of age-related cognitive and sensory impairments. How to develop an approach to enable inexperienced and young designers to effectively communicate with older people? A new and pragmatic framework is developed which aims to identify key factors of communication techniques that designers need to learn. This framework can help designers to decide which techniques are most relevant for specific conversation situations. It can also be used to systematically collect communication knowledge and skills as a designer’s personal communication guidance.