What do we want to accomplish through this project in Sri Lanka?

After long discussions in many days and months, we came up with four core goals for this project as follows:

1. Developing the culturally appropriate architectural design and care program

2. Applying the concept of aging in community

- Developed countries : creating intentional community

- Developing countries : maintain and strengthen the existing community to care for elders

3. Learning about the social value of elder care in Sri Lanka

4. Application of the lessons learned from the past experience of long term care for elders

First, as a group of young researchers in the field of Architecture, we felt the social responsibility of developing culturally appropriate design scheme for Sri Lankan. This is actually so much more complex than one may think. It requires strong understanding of not only the local architecture, but also lifestyle, demographical and social situation, and most importantly economical capability. I am sure that this learning process will never end....

Second, I personally wanted to explore the potential application of concept of "aging in community" which is an emerging idea to care for elders in developped countries. To transfer this idea in different countries, we made adjustment and defined the concept to fit with Sri Lanka. In the USA or Japan, aging in community is considered to be an "intentional community" where people would create. However, we thought it was very important to harvest the strong culture of inter-dependent lifestyle in the existing Sri Lankan community, and maintain and even strengthen the positive aspect with the appropriate housing support.

Third, we should learn the social value of elder care from Sri Lanka. This action will be essential to this project, however, more importantly it would be a valuable investment that we can learn and bring back to developed part of world.

The last goal was that we wanted to avoid making the same mistakes that developed part of world already experienced, such as hospital like long term care environment, neglect, isolation, or other negative histories of elderly care. We believe that it is our responsibility to inform our mistakes for them to avoid, so that elders in Sri Lanka will be treated with respect.

I will report the current aging situation in Sri Lanka in the next post.

Objective of Sri Lanka Project

Since I was not able to upload our presentation about the Sri Lanka, I decided to introduce the process and the current situation of our project in this blog in next several weeks. I hope you will enjoy getting to know our ideas and give us your feedback!

First, I would like to share the purpose of our project. There are two main goals that we would like to achive through this project.


1. Exploring the possibility of creating the age valued community in rural village in Sri Lanka

2. Exploring the mutual benefits through Information exchange

- developed countries: knowledge of long term care for elderly

- developing countries: social value of elder care

Our world established the paternalistic dynamics/attitude that developped part of world would help developping part of world by providing financial, technical, or other support, and slowly loosing the humble attitude of gratitude toward what we are given. Moreover, we are overlooking the wealth of wisdom and social value that have been sustained for centuries in cultually rich countries. When we try to help developing countries, we should be careful not to impose our idea but sincerely listen to what they really need and how we can be helpful to honor their cultual heritage.

Through studying elder care situation in Japan and the United States, I have learned that what elders are seeking is not "things or money," but much more simple things like happiness, relationship, meaning, or legacy, which cannot be measured by monetary value. I strongly believe that it is the time for us to re-visit traditional way of life that people informally help each other in a community. Since our society has lost the sense of community during the shift to capitalistic society, the developing part of the world can teach us social value of community and the meaning of elder care.

This project aim to explore the concept of "inter-dependency," and attempt to maintain the existing community in developing countries, and also examine what part of traditional community lifestyle can be transfered back to developed part of world, such as Japan and the USA. Most importantly, we would like to carefully think about how we as citizens in developed countries can be helpful to improve life of elders in the world.

Presentation in Montreal

My colleague and I presented the Sri Lanka project in the Interantional conference of aging and design in Montreal last week. Our presentation was well received and generated interesting questions from the audiences. I tried to upload the powerpoint presentation in this blog but I was not successful. Since the presentation will be available in the conference website, I will make a link to the site to make it available for viewers.

I have noticed that the sessions organized by developing part of world attracted less people than the ones done by developed countries in the conference. I do believe that design should be emerged from the cultural value and lifestyle, rather than copying the physical environment from other countries. In order to come up with innovative idea of elder care settings, it does worth for us to look into the developing part of the world to learn about the strong social value and community to care for elders, which may give us better design idea to enable elders to have normalized and enjoyable life style within their community.