For car makers, the age of their customers has long been a determining factor in the way in which the cars are designed and advertised, with some of them even going to great lengths to understand, first hand, what are the special need of a customer that is no longer in his prime.
You all know by now that Ford likes to mimic various things and situation, be it by creating special computer programs and simulation, or by creating hardware meant to emulate this or that.
A few years back, Ford designed what it liked to call the Third Age Suit, a special designed outfit that limits the movements of the wearer as if he were an elderly individual. The suit has been worn by Ford's engineers for some time now, helping design the cars in their entirety with the elderly and their limited movements in mind.
Now, the same suit will be employed by architects to design homes. Why? The reason is simple and was already stated above: none of us are getting younger.
The architects that have tested the suit at Ford's European Research Centre in Aachen are enchanted by the idea, even if none of them placed an order to Ford for a copy.
"For the first time, we intensively felt the restrictions of our target group and got a much closer understanding towards their real needs," says architect Gunter Helten, managing director of Aachen-based Hahn & Helten. "We are going to take what we've learned from this suit and apply those learnings in a practical manner so that our accommodation is the best it can possibly be for our elderly target market."
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