Design for the active ageing and autonomy: The role of industrial design in the development of the Habitat IoT project

The increasing emergence of social and healthcare costs due to constant ageing trends of the world population requires to find new solutions to support and prolong people’s independence within the everyday living environments. A research pool among Italian universities, industries and public agencies for the management of services to the person is developing a project called Habitat, aiming at elaborating and testing a platform based on the Internet of Things, thence enabling to create supportive and reconfigurable environments by implementing, improving or re-designing some of the objects of everyday use. The research methodology will be that of the User Centred Design, while the design tool for giving solutions to the end-users’ needs is the Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This article wants to investigate the role of design research within the Habitat project, and it will focus on the definition of the characteristics and contributions of design methods applied to a research project aimed at developing useful innovation for real users by a multidisciplinary team.