Designing homes for dignity

Invisible Creations is challenging stereotypes and negative stigmas around ageing and disability by producing attractive and inclusive home adaptations.

In 2018, we had an idea. Now, two years on, we’ve turned that idea into a reality.

When we came together as six strangers on the National Housing Federation’s ‘Creating our Future’ programme, we could never have imagined that our simple idea would come so far! 

Our mission was clear: come up with a solution to support people to live well in their homes for longer. We could have gone in so many different directions, but our research led us to explore the role of home adaptations.

We found that minor home adaptations can make the biggest difference to support people to live independently for longer. But we also found that the system is broken.

Current adaptations are installed reactively, once someone has fallen or ended up in hospital, and at that point – it’s often too late to really make a difference.

On top of that, the current marketplace provides clinical looking products that have so much negative stigma attached to them, that people would rather risk falling than getting them installed.

The scary reality is that despite adaptations having the potential to be life changing, they are often delayed, rejected or completely ignored. Many people delay installing adaptations until they reach crisis point, so as not to ‘medicalise’ their home, and they instead choose to adapt their behaviour rather than adapt their home.

For us, the solution was simple – place dignity at the heart of design.

And that’s exactly what we did. We set off in the pursuit of designing inclusive products that are functional and attractive.

That journey led us to establishing Invisible Creations, a business that’s challenging stereotypes and negative stigmas around ageing and disability by producing attractive and inclusive solutions.