Conference article

As globally demographic changes because of increasing life expectancy; concern about prompting greater health in old age is becoming more important. Trend shows by next three decades about 25 percent of living people are age 65 or older. Different researches has tried to define healthy aging factors objectively like ‘successful aging’ which divided aging well into three different components; physical health; social engagement and psychological health but when we look at this criteria subjectively there is no specific method to discover elder’s psychological desires. In this paper we used Kansei theory as method to define elder’s psychological needs to design built-in urban environment. As with the case for this study we choose a group of old male and female Iranian elders as participant in to understand their aesthetic; emotional; and other experiential factors which leads to design facilities and surrounding toward aging successfully and offer a framework about our target group needs; based on Kansei methodology.

Kansei; Successful aging; urban design; Iranian elders