You can listen to Episode S3E2 right here!
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Hello, and welcome to the Third Age Design podcast, sharing essential information on senior environments. I’m Lori Pinkerton-Rolet. Can you hear me? Okay? No, really, any background noise is your volume level, okay. As designers and architects, you know, we’re trained to think about the operational use of a space that we use and design. But more importantly, we’re taught about what they should look like. But that’s only one of our five senses. This month, we begin to review of considerations for some of the other senses that seldom receive attention. Ipof we’re really to move the delivery of senior environments forward than in my opinion, without looking at all of the sensory needs of people, we do a disservice. Part one of our series, ‘Designing for the Other Four Senses’, focuses on acoustics, and we’ll be joined in a moment by Nick Treby, Associate Director of the internationally renowned Spectrum Acoustic Consultants, who will walk us through the basics. And in this month’s Inovation Spotlight, I’m going to tell you about what can be learned from a job swap in care environments. American writer, editor, magazine publisher and activist Francis Lear, is credited with this fantastic statement. “I believe the second half of one’s life is meant to be better than the first half. The first half is about finding out how to do it, and the second half is enjoying it.” So for those of us who work in the senior living sphere, this comment underlines the real importance of what we and operators do for a living. These environments are not just a place in which people will live, but one that should also truly be enjoyed. And that’s also why the Third Age Design podcast exists to research and share information on interior environments for the Third Age internationally, and to improve standards and raise expectations everywhere. And you can be a part of this by hitting the Join Us button on our website at Third Age.Design. And when you do you’ll also receive this quarter’s A TAD Extra, exclusive information for our community members. And it’s free to join. The Third Age Design podcast is supported by Innova Care Concepts whose mission is to enhance quality of life through innovation. From hydrotherapy pools to furniture, you’ll find quality, aesthetics and functionality in all unique Innova products. Innova Care Concepts, the leading edge of health care. Okay, let’s get started. My guest today is Nick Treby, Associate Director at Spectrum Acoustic Consultants in the United Kingdom, but who works all over the world. Nick completed his undergraduate degree in engineering acoustics and vibration at the Institute of Sound and VBibration Research at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and he’s been working in the sector ever since. He’s a corporate member of the Institute of Acoustics and a member of the Audio Engineering Society, plus a Registered Sound Installation tester with the Association of Noise Consultants. And I do hope our producer is very extra careful with the mix this month because Nick will be listening. Nick, welcome to the Third Age Design podcast.
Nick Treby
Thanks for having me on Lori. It’s a real pleasure to have the opportunity to come and talk to you about some of these things.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Thank you so much. When we had a preliminary phone discussion, you mentioned, Nick, that there was a building that you’ve not worked on that had actually been rendered unusable when it completed because of the acoustics. And I think this is a really good place to start without using any names. What would render a building unusable because of acoustics, can you give us a sample?
Nick Treby
It’s a great place to start. And I could give you a huge long list actually, of places that just are unusable or don’t work. Let me give you two examples of two cases. One was a school and it was a school for children from the ages of four to about nine. And at lunchtime, they all go into the school hall for their lunch. And you can imagine how noisy it is in the school hall when all these 4-9 year olds are all having their lunch. It’s it’s really loud, even when the children aren’t being particularly loud themselves. But it’s high ceiling. It’s hard walls, it’s hard floors and it’s really noisy. And there was one little girl in that school who had some autistic issues. And she couldn’t have lunch in the hall because she couldn’t cope with the noise. So every day, she had to have lunch in a classroom on her own without any of her friends. Just all that was slightly heartbreaking really, yeah. Because you know, you’ve just got a room where everybody else goes for the lunch, and this little girl just can’t cope with the noise. Now, I suspect many of us actually have got an experience a bit like that, where you go into where we’ve been into a space that oh, this is just awful. I can’t really bear to be in here any longer. But that was something that this little girl was suffering in quite an extreme way, in that particular hall. And actually, we did manage to help them sorted out and it was a it was really great when, after the work had been done, to get this little note through…so yeah, she gets to have lunch with her friends now. And just think I transforming that is for that little girl, you know, it’s not it wasn’t a big project. But it’s completely changed her life completely changed her experience of school. The other one I want to talk about is slightly different is somebody who delivers therapy, so their educational psychologist, and they rent some offices in a bigger office complex, and they have people in and they have counselling sessions in their office complex. But the problem they’ve got is that the room that they’ve got for their counselling, is next door to and they bring office at a time the person in the office next door is on the phone, they can completely hear it in their counselling room, and presumably vice versa, as well. And so actually trying to give confidential therapy trying to deal with these sorts of things. You simply can’t use the rooms for that purpose. And in the end, the landlords of that building had to just agree to let them out of the lease because the rooms were unusable, and it was it was unviable. You know, they couldn’t conduct their business.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So the acoustics made it not fit for purpose.
Nick Treby
Completely. I mean, yes. And it wasn’t even that it wasn’t great. It was actually ‘we can’t do this here’. And so the landlords had to lose money, and they’ve just had to move out. And they’ve had to go through all that sort of disruption,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
…and disruption, and presumably cost of moving and, and letting everyone know and everything. You were mentioning about in the school, you had these high ceilings, and you had hard floors and etc, etc. And of course, in senior living, senior care environments, that’s almost always the case. I mean, sometimes we’re able to get carpet in there. But it’s usually we’re asked for vinyl finishes. The architects have taken a direction of light, which is sort of floor to ceiling glass. People with hearing aids, this must be an absolute nightmare. How in the first part of this question…how do you think hard surfaces affect people with hearing difficulty or hearing aids?
Nick Treby
You can actually open that out. And it’s not just people with hearing aids, all of us have got an experience of going into a coffee shop, or a bar or a restaurant where there’s a hard floor, and there’s hard walls, and it’s a hard ceiling. And it’s noisy. And if you haven’t got impaired hearing, you can probably adapt, and you can probably cope. Because you can sort of work out, you can concentrate a little easier, you can hear a bit better. But the moment your hearing starts to be impaired, and that can be anything from a very mild hearing loss right through to something which maybe doesneed hearing aids. Or, you know, about one in eight people in the UK, they reckon have got some form of hearing loss. So you know, more than 10% of people, the moment you put people with a more extreme reaction, like somebody who has got hearing aids, who has got a hearing loss, this spaces become very, very difficult indeed, to have conversations in that it’s so noisy, and it’s so echoey the echoes, or just mask the sound of what you’re trying to hear. And you’ve got no clarity at all, like listening to a really, really bad PA system or loudspeaker where there’s no clarity in the speech that’s being put across, because it’s all be it being hidden by what’s happening to the noise around the room. So you simply can’t hear. And of course, what people do in those circumstances, they don’t go back to that space again. And if you run a restaurant, if you’ve got a communal facility in place for people who are older, people simply won’t go back to those spaces because they can’t communicate in them. And they feel awful having to sit there not be able to ask and not be able to have a conversation. feel like they’re having to ask you to repeat yourself feel like they’re having to look at you very very carefully to try and get lip reading. Yeah cues as well.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Well, it certainly wouldn’t feel like home, would it? Nobody’s, nobody’s home tends to be that acoustically bright. So there’s, there’s automatically a difference in ceiling height in materials that are around you that might be sound absorbent or might have effect things.
Nick Treby
You’re exactly right. In our homes, we have sofas, we have cushions, we have curtains, you know, we have carpets, all the things which help avoid these big echoey spaces. But you know, why do we sing in the shower? You know, I don’t know whether you do or not. But why do we sit in the shower? Because that room sounds completely different when it’s hard surfaces. And it makes our singing sound marvellous. But it’s not a place, you’d want to have a party trying to have a conversation. And not just because it’s the bathroom. But when it’s all those hard finishes, you can’t have those sorts of conversations.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So when you’re doing a new build, yeah, and let’s say let’s say an architect or designer has not been able to talk a client into bringing in an acoustician to review. Are there certain guidelines that we as designers or architects just automatically ought to think about? For these sorts of spaces?
Nick Treby
Yeah, where is there something soft in that room, if you’ve got a hard floor, a hard timber floor or vinyl floor, your glass walls that are hard ceiling? Where are you going to get something into that room that is soft, that is going to absorb a little bit of the noise, you know, and it might be in some curtains that you put up, it might be in some sofas that you’re introducing into the space, you know, some of your furnishings and so forth. But you’d really want to be thinking about how do we get something soft into this room, just to try and make sure that we’re going to get a little bit of sound absorption. Now, I really like to see a carpeted floor, although that doesn’t help very much. But it does help things like chair scraping noise and all of that kind of thing. Yes, I’m more keen, usually on some sort of acoustic acoustically absorbent ceiling. I think that’s a good thing to try and achieve if you can, you can’t always, but you can put acoustic absorption onto the ceiling in terms of panels or rafts that you hang and all that kind of thing. And the other thing, which is always overlooked, which I do find quite frustrating. But you want to get the acoustic absorption close to where the people are. So you want a distribution through the room, you don’t want it all in one corner, you sometimes see it in offices where they won’t have a feature wall. But actually you do want a bit of it distributed around the room. Quite often these rooms will have some artwork. Yes. You can print artwork onto canvas panels, like you see often. But you can also print that artwork onto acoustic panels. And 99% of people would not see any difference in that artwork, whether it’s on a normal canvas panel, or if it’s on an acoustically absorptive panel. And if you start to have a few of those dotted around the room, then you’re just being able to start to take the edge off the acoustic performance, you’re not necessarily compromising your hard surface look, which might be what you wanted to go for as part of as an interior design. But if your artwork is printed onto these acoustically absorptive panels, you are at least starting to get some sound absorption in. Yes. And because it’s on the walls, it’s down at a lower height closer to where the people are. So it’s actually going to do a bit more work. You see it sometimes in offices when you visit offices, and they’ve got a big reception desk and a logo, often reception desk for offices. You’re in awful atria.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, huge, well, they’re not awful. But they’re awful acoustically,
Nick Treby
Acoustically sorry, I judge everything by an acoustics if it’s awful acoustically, it’s awful. That’s that’s just the way that’s my life. And they but they will always have a huge logo for the business, behind the desk, or on the front of the reception desk that could have been put onto an acoustically absorbent panel. And that that would have just helped and it doesn’t solve the problem. But it just all helps to get you in the right direction.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
But going back to your original, your original example in the school, the most complicated space for us as designers and architects is really any dining area because you’ve got the noise of cutlery, you’ve got noise of eating even, and and that is really a very hard surface sort of area. So what you’re suggesting with the artwork is one approach. Would it also help in these areas to break them up with dividing walls to make smaller spaces? Does that tend to help acoustically or can that be more complicated?
Nick Treby
That can help. Obviously, if you if you’re going to separate the spaces with bookshelves and things like this, it doesn’t really separate the spaces because they’re still all linked together because the noise goes round and through and over the bookcase. Right? So you can partition them all off into small dining rooms. But then you sometimes that’s not what you wanted to achieve, you want it to be a big space. Where those sorts of things help where you start to break them up, is what that does it creates some diffusion is the word that we would call it in acoustics. So instead of a sound ray, if you like bouncing from one end of a big room to the other end of the big room, actually, it hits some furniture, and then it spreads out. A good example might be, we often often will talk in terms of light, which people perhaps find more relatable. If you’ve got a long room with no furniture or anything, and you turn on a sharp sort of spotlight, it will follow very, very narrow paths and bounce back and bounce back and forth. You put some shelves in what the shelves start to do is diffuse the light a little bit. And it helps you get exactly the same with the acoustic performance. So if you can actually start to put some bookshelves in some some bits of furniture, then it does all help to give it a bit of a separation. So the noise starts to spread out a little bit, then what that does, is that if you have got some acoustic absorption, say in your ceiling, it actually starts to make that acoustic absorption work a bit harder for you. Because instead of a noise ray bouncing back and forth across two of the horizontal walls, and not being absorbed by anything. When it hits that bookshelf, it scatters. So far, it’s been scattered up. So some of it is being picked up by the absorption up at the ceiling, or a bit on the floor. You notice this sometimes in rooms where you’ve got a lot of absorption on the ceiling, and a lot of absorption on the floor. But when you clap, you can still hear a little echo. Yes, and that’s called a flutter echo. And what you’re hearing is the noise bouncing off of the parallel walls that don’t have any treatment on Ah, right, you get it a lot in offices where you might have glass sides, hard ends with an acoustic ceiling. And so you’re hearing that noise bounce off their hard opposite walls. But if you put some bookcases in, or some furniture, that’s diffusing the sound, you’re breaking up that path. So the noise is going to be absorbed by the ceiling. So that can be a useful, it’s a useful little trick. But that needs to be done in conjunction with some sound absorption. Really,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
You were speaking about lighting and using lighting as an example. And that leads me on to my next question, because when we’re designing lighting, the best practice is several layers. So you’d have lighting from above, you might even have lighting towards towards or on to the floor surface, you’d have standing lamps, you might have wall lights, and also table lights. And that is our best way of lighting, lighting a space for multipurpose use, for example. And you’d also have task lighting if there was a specific art project or a desk or something. Is that the same with acoustics then, that you’re looking for as many different layers as it at as many different heights as possible, or is it not quite the same?
Nick Treby
Yeah definitely. When you are looking multipurpose rooms are tricky, acoustically. Because you often will want quite conflicting things in different areas. But one of the things that you really want to try and do is to get some acoustic absorption evenly distributed throughout the space. If you want the whole space to kind of work in the same sort of way, you would want to try and evenly distribute the acoustic absorption, just like you want to position your lights so that you get an even spread of light around the whole room. And so if you put all your acoustic absorption up in the ceiling, that’s great. But you’re not really dealing with what’s going on in those walls. And in the lighting equivalents, you might end up with a little dark corner somewhere, or a little area, which is a bit shadowy, and acoustically would be exactly the same. But actually, what I really like to see is some acoustic absorption spread across the ceiling, and a little bit on each of the walls as well. So that you’ve actually got a nice even distribution of acoustic absorption around the room. Now, sometimes that’s not practical, and you know, all the acoustic absorption will start going into the ceiling. And if it’s a low ceiling, perhaps you might get away with that, but as the ceiling heights start to get higher and higher, it becomes less and less effective. The other advantage with distributing material ran walls and so forth, is that actually you find that you can reduce the amount of material you need in a space by positioning it in the right places. So rather than say covering 100% of your ceiling in this and absorption, you might be able to get away with 50% of your ceiling in a sound absorptive product, and maybe on the walls, an amount that would bring you up to the equivalent of 75%. So instead of having 100% of your floor area of sound absorption, you’ve probably only you may only have 75%. So you’ve saved money on the installation by putting product in the right places, right? So because it’s worth it, you’ll get you get it working harder for you by doing that,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, you’re basically deploying it, you’re choosing where you’re deploying your interventions.
Nick Treby
That’s exactly right. So if you’ve got a room, which is 100 square metres, you might say, well, to get the reverberation control that I need, I either need a ceiling, which is 100 square metres of sound absorption. Or, I’m going to put 50 square metres on the ceiling. And I’m going to put 25 square metres spread around the walls.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
How do I know how much I need?
Nick Treby
We can do calculations. There’s…
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
I need an I need a professional acoustician for that.
Nick Treby
I think, yes, you do. If you’re if you want to do calculations, and you want to try and achieve certain criteria, so we will often often talk about something which is a reverberation time, where the lower the number, the the acoustically dead space will be. So if you are trying to design to a specific target, then yes, you’re going to need an acoustician, who is going to do start talking to you about some thing called Sabin, who do all these equations some years ago, or they might start talking to you about Ray Tracing Noise Models. And we can do all that sort of stuff for you. And we would do all that sort of thing. If you’re looking at complex spaces. You know, if you’re doing this in concert halls, you know, you go to town on the obviously.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That’s what made me think that you made me think of I got to sing in St. Paul’s couple of times and talk about delay. Yes. Sound in actual fact, the the organist and the conductor in the choir were at a different time to the congregation. Yes. In order to make it all come out at the same time. Yeah, that’s right has to be Yeah, a second or two I think ahead.
Church music is clear that… the other time you always spot that is when you’re watching a sporting event, and they sing the national anthem at the start, the person or the band who are leading it are always completely out of time for the rest of the stadium, because they’re hearing it on this delay. Yeah. So if you’re working to certain criteria, and you’ve got employees requirements, which have numerical criteria, then yes, you’re going to need an acoustician to do those calculations for you.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
If you were designing a space, and the client says, Okay, we’re going to have hearing loops in this area, this area, this area, do you approach those spaces any differently to any spaces without hearing loops?
Nick Treby
Not really, I think it’s the same sort of rules go with it, Lori, and again, you just want nice control of the reverberation. Hearing loops are helpful, we find actually that an awful lot of people with the facility for hearing loops don’t know how to use their hearing aids to access them. And actually, a lot of places that have got hearing loops installed, haven’t, you know, never test them to see if they’re working properly. Really if you’ve got a hearing loop, hearing aid and a hearing loop in a room, your best choices really to engage with the hearing loop is to try and position yourself somewhere where the hearing loop signal is stronger. So the church I go to we’ve got a hearing loop. And it’s positioned, it runs around a certain part of the building. So we can say to people who want to engage with the hearing loop, actually, if you sit in one of these areas, you will find it a little bit easier to follow than if you’re right in the middle of the space. But again, it’s about getting good reverberation control, really in place. And it’s the same sort of rules, Lori, a lot of jobs, you’re not working to acoustic criteria for this sort of thing. And in those sorts of circumstances do you need to engage an acoustic consultant? Well, my marketing team would tell me to tell you yes, of course you should. But also, if actually you’ve got you’ve had a bit of a think about it, and you’ve got a reasonable quantity of soft surfaces going into your room, you’re probably going to be there or there abouts and get things right, there’s always mistakes that get made that would have perhaps otherwise been picked up. But if you’ve got a room with some carpet with some soft furnishings in, you know, you’re going to be okay. And if you’ve got hearing loops going into spaces, you know, so long as you’ve got a reasonably good acoustic control in the space from some sound absorption and so forth. And people knowing how to use the hearing loop properly, then, you know, you’re okay, you can make these things work.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
I think the main thing is it affects us whether or not we identify it and articulate the fact that this space feels comfortable. This space feels nice. And it’s because of the acoustics. We don’t necessarily think that way. But it does absolutely impact the way a human being experiences an environment. Yeah. 100% Am I correct?
Nick Treby
completely agree with you. It’s funny. Nobody ever notices the acoustics of a space until it’s bad. Yeah. And when it’s bad, you really notice it. And actually, a lot of people then think, just think that’s how it is and that there’s nothing that can be done about it. And of course, the point is, you can design about it, you can sort these things out. London Underground was always a great example that you could never ever hear any of the the announcements on the London Underground, because it was all hard surfaces really run clear. But over over recent years, so acousticians, not us different company have been going through and they’ve been introducing some sound absorption into London Underground. And actually, the environment now in a lot of those stations is quite pleasant. And you don’t have those same hard surfaces, and you can hear the announcements. You walk into a restaurant where it’s done badly, you know about it straightaway. And it’s tiring, hard work to have a conversation. very exhausting. Yeah. But the point really, is that actually, the building that you’re building, the space you’re providing doesn’t have to be bad, there are ways to think about this. And to get it right. Actually, without it being, you know, particularly high cost, you might be spending several million pounds on constructing your new building, your acoustic costs are going to be very small in the grand scheme of things. And they can just help you fall it help you from falling into some of those big traps.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
May I give you this as your crystal ball question. Now, if you’re looking into the future, and there’s a senior living environment, care or retirement, you know, whatever do you think in the future, the design will look different if acoustics were more integrated into our design considerations? I don’t know that they would look hugely different. But it would be what I would like what I would like from a crystal ball, because I don’t want to come in and tell the interior designer, you can’t do any of those things that you wanted to do, because they’re all going to be terrible acoustically. We want to work with the designers who are trying to provide a certain look and a certain feel to the space and to help them work and greater good acoustic environment within the confines of what they’re trying to create. So I think what I would like from my crystal ball, is that actually on any projects, where there will be people in a building, and especially Retirement Living, that sort of environment, I would like there to be an acoustic consultant employed not because there’s some regulation somewhere that says you have to, but because the team understand that an acoustic consultant will bring us some value here, and will help us to create a space that will sound good, that actually thinking about it early on, we can avoid some bad mistakes, like Oh, hang on a minute, you’ve got that flat laid out. So there’s a bedroom right next to that lift, you know, you can pick that up right at the beginning of a job and save yourself years of grief, you might be able to look at it and say, well hang on, in this particular communal room, you’ve got here, your ceilings are very, very high, you can bring your ceilings down little bit, you’re going to improve the acoustic environment, these sorts of things, by getting an acoustic consultant involved early on, you can sort lots of these things out, really at very little cost, you design them out. And so that then you sort of never end up, never have to think about it again. And you’ll probably get to the end of the job. And you think well wonder what the point of the acoustic consultant was because they’re not really done anything. But we’ve made these little tweaks these modifications at the right times to create these good environments. Now, a lot of the work that we get involved in is because it’s regulated. So if you’re building a care home in the UK, we will have to get involved in planning applications, which will deal with noise getting in from outside, we will have to deal with the sound insulation between your bedroom and your neighbor’s bedroom, and that kind of thing. But that’s about the limit of it. Whereas it would be really nice if owners, developers, clients of these sorts of buildings would say, well, I know that’s the regulation thing. We’ve got to we’ve got to meet the regulations. But actually, there’s lots of acoustic things that aren’t regulated that we would just like to get right. And so we would like to engage you not just to tick the regulation boxes, but actually to be a member of the design team, to work with our architects to work with our interior designers to work with our mechanical engineers. As we move through the process, just to make sure that throughout all of this scheme, we’re not about to fall into any big traps.
Nick Treby
…And you’re creating an environment which feels right. Which exactly isn’t necessarily about articulating the fact that the acoustics are working properly, therefore, you’re not noticing them. But there are, for example, aren’t bad smells. I mean, you can start to pick apart all five senses. But if it’s right, you feel it. Yes, that’s exactly right. That when people are sitting in that communal lounge, having a conversation, they’re comfortable, they can have the conversation, you know, when they’ve got the television on, or they’re watching, they’re watching a film, they can hear it easily. It’s not tiring, you know, that when they go into in for dinner, you know, the room is a nice space to sit and have dinner in. You know, it’s like, it’s nice to look at, it’s nice to listen to, and it’s just comfortable. When that happens, actually, people don’t notice it at all. It’s only odd people like me that walk into space, and the all the acoustics in here is good. But most people, you just, they just want to be in those comfortable environments. Because when you get them wrong, actually, they don’t want to be in there. And sometimes they can articulate that they can say actually, I don’t like that space, because it is too noisy. Yeah, can’t hear me very often. Actually, they can’t articulate it. They just know that they don’t like the space. And they don’t really know why. And that’s a very common experience. And engaging acoustic consultant. Just thinking about this, you know, right from the beginning of a design can just help to avoid all of those sorts of difficulties.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Nick, thank you so much for having us sort of global overview of this with us today. I really do hope that it has fostered some further thinking on behalf of the listeners in terms of what they’re doing on their own projects and the integration of some of these details. And we’ll obviously be giving links on our website to you and your organisation as well. And thank you so much.
Nick Treby
Thanks, Lori. That’s an absolute pleasure. And it’s always nice to be invited to ride my hobby horse for a little while.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Those of us here in the UK are familiar with a little store called Harrods. And you may recall that the previous owner was an Egyptian businessman named Mr. Mohammed Al Fayed. Unlike owners of similar establishments, Mr. Al Fayed yet could be seen on the shop floor, usually behind the cold meats counter and serving customers. He believed he would better understand both the customer and the staff experience in this way. And apparently he likes slicing meat. So I have got to tell you about Saluton CEO John Godden, who launched a new initiative by Salutem Care and Education that involved job swapping for the purpose of improving transparency within the company. John switched his job for a day with a Deputy Manager and Personal Carer looking after three individuals living with quite complex needs. So the Duty Manager will also be getting a crack at being the CEO of salute them for a day. We’re going to be speaking with Mr. Godden on a future episode in April about how much he learned personally from this experience. And we invite you in the meantime to think about what a job swap might look like within your organisation and what there is to be learned by that. So more on this in due course. Just a quick look then at our TAD International Events Calendar for 2023. May continues to be a busy month in the senior living sector, with the Senior Living Executive Conference taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the US from the 8th to the 10th. And the International Forum in Copenhagen will take place from the 15th to the 17th of May, with a focus on quality and safety in healthcare. Skipping ahead to October, the 33rd Alzheimer Europe Conference will take place in Helsinki, Finland, from the 16th of October to the 18th. ‘Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I like to be.’ Okay, I’m going to stop now, because otherwise I will get sued for copyright infringement. Anyway, you’re gonna find further details and listings on the event page at www.thirdage.design. Thank you to today’s special guest, Nick Treby from Spectrum Acoustic Consultants, to our Producer Mike Scales, to Valerie Adler of The Right Website to Peter Thorne, who composed our theme music and is playing the piano with Mary Blanchard on flute, and also to our sponsor Innova Care Concepts, the leading edge of health care. Finally, to you. Thank you for being part of a community who believes we can improve senior environments together. I’m Lori Pinkerton-Rolet and next month we’re continuing our series ‘Designing for the Other Four Senses’ with a review of olfactory interventions in senior living. I do hope you’ll join me.