Senior citizens – for a long time, the term was more often associated with coffee klatch and cream-coloured all-purpose windbreakers rather than a target group with money to spend. But it is expanding: every fifth German today is over sixty years old. According to the German Census Bureau, soon it will be even every third. The age pyramid the demographers once referred to has actually turned into an age mushroom: the layer of older people is widening while younger people diminish in numbers. And since now already a third of all men and women remain childless, the old folks of tomorrow will want to manage their lives as singles on their own. They will also be forced to do so, since in the future the health care system will no longer pay for all nursing services.
In February of this year the state of North Rhine-Westphalia estimated that through services, products and travel offers for senior citizens 100,000 new jobs could be generated there alone. Designers, technicians, ergonomists, social scientists and doctors already discussed these ideas in the context of the Sentha research project in Berlin some time ago. While in the mid-1990’s people elsewhere worried about educating young consumers about the internet or mobile communication, in Berlin the focus was on how older people are actually coping with everyday objects. And they went back to the drawing boards.

 A trivet on wheels that can be pushed across the table – why hasn't anyone come up with that one before? Or the coffee-coloured, heat-resistant ring made for those latte macchiato glasses that have a tendency to get a wee bit too hot? Or a dish brush pre-filled with detergent ready to be released at the touch of a button. Why should you squeeze a garlic press when it would be ergonomically easier to rotate it? And why isn't the oven at the same convenient level as the fridge? Why can't you sit comfortably while taking a shower? Or why can't you exit the bathtub through a sliding door?
Considering what kind of products have been conceived and created during the last eight years at the faculty of design at the Universität der Künste (Udk) will disabuse anyone of the notion that everything that could have been invented has been. Or that everything that exists is also adequate. Whether beauty or function – design students here learn the rule that there's always room for improvement. The 150 students enrolled in seminars with Achim Heine, UdK professor for product design, and his assistants Karin Schmidt-Ruhland and Mathias Knigge, were faced with even more complicated tasks in the context of the so-called Sentha project. Sentha is the German abbreviation for "suitable engineering for seniors in their domestic life". The students were supposed to design everyday objects for people whose hands cannot hold a tin of canned food tightly enough or whose backs do not stretch like they used to.