Many extra care housing schemes are not implementing basic specialist design advice that would improve the lives of people with sight loss. In a bid to reverse this, the sight loss charity has launched a new tool, Evolve-for vision, which tests how well housing performs for older people with sight loss and highlights which areas can be improved.
Evolve-for vision is a tool for evaluating the design of housing for older people with sight loss. It is a specialist version of EVOLVE, a more general evaluation tool which tests how buildings perform for all older people, which is available on the Housing LIN website.
Background:
When research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) looked into the quality of life of older people living in extra care housing, it found that buildings did not provide enough sensory support. Following this, Thomas Pocklington Trust funded a further study to look specifically at the needs of people with sight loss and to develop a specialist tool that could test buildings on their performance for this specific group.
The EPSRC-funded study developed a tool called EVOLVE – Evaluation of Older People’s Living Environments - to evaluate how well buildings cater for older people’s needs. An electronic checklist, it listed important elements of design in the order they might be found in a walk-through of a dwelling, and calculated scores to show how well the building has performed. The EVOLVE tool reflects the needs of the general population of older people, and includes a sensory support domain. However there was scope for a tool which concerned the specific needs of people with sight loss in more depth.The follow-up Pocklington study - Extra Care Housing for People with Sight Loss: Lighting and Design set out to address this. It specifically explored the needs of people with sight loss and established a specialist version of the EVOLVE tool to evaluate buildings on how well they meet the needs of this specific group. Our Research Findings No. 36 sets out the main points from the report.
Evolve-for vision is this specialist tool. Its room by room checklist highlights almost 400 design features relevant to quality of life for older people with sight loss. Designed as a series of statements, grouped together in themes, the tool is easy to download to a laptop and simple to use. Basic questions such as “the front door locking system is easy to operate”, and “the kitchen floor is non-slip” are answered either yes, no, not in use, or not applicable. The resulting scores, presented automatically in an easy to read graph, show how well an apartment, house or bungalow performs for a person with sight loss. As scores are given for each theme – lighting, wayfinding etc – the tool easily identifies which areas need improvement.
The Pocklington study tested the tool in extra care housing schemes as well as evaluating existing design guidance and interviewing residents. The findings of this study reaffirmed the importance of specialist design guidance for people with low vision. Where such specialist guidance had been applied there were important benefits for older people in carrying out everyday tasks in the home. However, the study found that the design of extra care housing schemes is not meeting the needs of people with sight loss as well as it could and that most extra care schemes do not take account of specialist guidance. As sight loss is commonly associated with age, it is recommended that for general evaluations of buildings for older people, the Evolve-for vision checklist be used alongside the EVOLVE tool, and that the specialist design guidance should be incorporated into the established general design guidance.
Although both tools were developed from research into extra care housing, they can both be applied to other forms of housing, such as sheltered housing or private houses. Both can be used in the design and commissioning of new buildings or by housing managers in the long term evaluation and upgrading of existing schemes.
