Best Paper by a Young Author Award - Research Team "Housing Lab" - Safe and Inclusive Housing for an Ageing Society

The housing demand dictated by ageing population deals with the need to guarantee safe and inclusive living environments to older adults: on the one hand, the request is to up-grade home environments to future standards, providing them with ever changing innovative technologies; on the other hand, the strengthening of relationships between networks and urban services is able to guarantee the elderly all necessary supports for their social, psychic and health needs. In the new perspective where advanced technologies are strictly related to end-users’ needs, the typological and technological meta-design represents the most correct method for the systematization of information, to declare the centrality of human needs while respecting the market logic and to interpret and provide new forms of building types. While the correct insertion of buildings in the micro-urban context and an appropriate design of the home environment are useful to meet changing needs of elderly people, the integration of smart technologies in the built environment could further improve conditions of comfort, safety and security of older adults in their own home, making them feel more independent, assisted and productive. The design in favour of social inclusion for the elderly integrated with innovative technologies is able to achieve the highest quality of life (QoL) of a “smart living” for all end-users involved. Those frameworks are the basis for the construction of a certification quality protocol. The paper synthetizes the first results of a research in progress aimed at defining an AAL protocol for the quality certification of smart residential building interventions for the elderly and fragile users. Adopting the typical rating systems structure, the protocol can be used as a design guide to the scale of the flat or the building, as a tool to support decision making at the district or city scale, or as an interactive tool through which to certify the quality of the interventions planned/realized.