Seminars

Global aging provides an extraordinary business opportunity for designers.  Design has a powerful potential to minimize the limitations of age and enhance abilities to make the most of everyone’s talents over the life span.  But success depends not only on knowing how to do it but also sell it.  Attendees can expect to understand trends in the market and specific examples of culturally tailored strategies for growth that integrate savvy attention to inclusive design.  This interactive session is rooted in the reality that aging impacts every nation. No one can afford to exclude this growing proportion of the population.

Speakers: Valerie Fletcher is Executive Director of the Institute for Human Centered Design, an international educational non-profit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and founded in 1978. The mission is to advance the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages and abilities. Fletcher currently oversees projects ranging from universal design at the urban scale, in public transit, in mixed use development, in higher education and in residential design.  She is a Special Advisor to TOTO Ltd. and to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.  She lectures and writes internationally.  Fletcher’s career has been divided between design and public mental health.  Fletcher has a master degree in ethics and public policy from Harvard University.  The Boston Society of Architects awarded her the Women in Design award in 2005.

Dr. Jane Barratt, Montreal-based secretary general of the International Federation on Aging, Margaret Gillis, director of the Division of Aging and Seniors and of the Office of the Voluntary Sector at the Public Health Agency of Canada.