Comprehensive Analysis Of Older People’s Lifestyle And The Elderly Toy Design Based On Design Affairology

With the increasing of the old people in China, the old people’s leisureentertainment demand is soaring. Health status, living environment and the stateof the economy’s difference make old people have different needs to the leisureentertainment products. At present，product design for the elderly are moreconcentrated in health care rather than recreational products. At the same time,the related theory study focused on the design concept of discussion, with littleon design method construction. As design methodology, design affairology isaimed at establishing system solutions, methods and organizational managementmechanism to the problems by the analysis of internal elements and itslimitations relations among the user, task and environment, which compose"affair" concept. Design affairology provides a theoretical guidance for olderentertainment product design.This paper studied the old people’s lifestyle, the old psychological andcognitive characteristics, put forward the old toy design method and designstrategy from the perspective of design affairology.The lifestyle evaluation form was developed to divide the elderly into threedifferent groups: energetic type, family-centered type and depressed type, by theanalytical methods of factor analysis and cluster analysis etc.，and then study thedifferences in recreation preferences and motivations between the different typesof elderly people by correspondence analysis and comparative analysis. Thesubdivision of older population helped to grasp the different groups’ life attitude,psychological characteristics, leisure behavior patterns, leisure preferences andexpectations and pursue, understand the different types of old people leisuredemand, and enhance the pertinence and design purpose. In terms ofphysiological characteristics, motor function including physical strength, gripstrength, ability to keep balance and agility shows a downward trend accompanied with function declining of muscle, bone, joint, nervous system,cardiovascular and respiratory system. The elderly cognitive is declining withage, which characterized by the declining in abilities of information perception,processing and decreasing in the sensitivity of information and lead to the elderlymemory, thinking, attention, learning ability declining. As a result, toy designshould take into account the fitness and educational functions as well as theentertainment features.The innovation of the paper mainly includes:1.Established lifestylesclassification model of the elderly which divide the elderly into three differentgroups and analyzed the differences on recreational preferences and motivationsbetween different groups.2.Proposed the concept of the elderly recreational affairsystem，established research framework of the toy design，and summarizeddesign methods and strategies from design affairology.3. Proposed a fitness andeducational toy design.