You can listen to Episode S4E4 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, and this month we’re continuing with part two of game-changing the flooring for health in senior environments. Now, last month, we introduced you to a self-cleaning, environmentally sustainable infection control carpet. And if you missed that, please do go back and have a listen. And that’s really the beauty of podcasts…they’re still here whenever you need them! In this particular episode, I’ll be speaking to Shaz Hawkins of Tarkett flooring, about vinyl flooring designed specifically for dementia, and which is also sustainable. You know, I’d never thought I’d have to say that in the same sentence, vinyl and sustainability. As Bob Dylan once sang, ‘the times they are changing’. And in our ‘Innovation Spotlight’, I’m going to be telling you about AI and senior living and the positive ways in which they can intersect. Let’s stick with Bob Dylan for a moment. One of my favourite quotes of his is, “we have never arrived, we’re in a constant state of becoming.” Now that can be true of both ourselves, but also the work we do originally care facilities. For example, were alms houses or parts of hospitals or even built to look like a hospital. And more recently, you’ll know that the trend is towards more of a hotel kind of look for those that can afford it. But what will the model eventually become? Well, that’s really up to us. And that’s why the Third Age Design podcast actually exists to provide designers, architects, developers and operators with the latest concepts and innovations from around the world to improve senior living environments. And if you go to the website at Third Age Dot Design and hit the ‘Join Us’ button, you’ll automatically receive this quarters ‘A Tad Extra’, exclusive information for our community members. The Third Age Design podcast is supported by Wissner-Bosserhoff. Elevate nursing care with intelligent beds from Wissner-Bosserhoff, blending modern day smart care technology with comfort, empowering caregivers worldwide. Discover more at www wi-bo.com. That’s www wi-bo.com. Okay, let’s get started. Did you know that traditional cotton is one of the least sustainable materials? Well, it’s largely due to bleaching and the amount of water that’s needed to create the fabric. However, sometimes the things we think of that are sustainable aren’t and vice versa. Today, my guest is Shaz, Hawkins, segment Marketing Manager for the International flooring company Tarkett. And we’re going to go into sustainability and flooring in a little bit. But what initially caught our attention here at TAD, was the idea of flooring, which has been designed specifically for health and in particular dementia. My understanding is your company just launched a human conscious design principles piece, which I think ties in quite nicely to the topic of dementia specific design, as well as other end user groups. Can you explain why Tarkett felt this was required? Because it’s quite a large piece of work you’ve done? And can you also just briefly touch on what it might mean to the various stakeholders that this touches upon?
Shaz Hawkins
Yes, and you’re right, Lori, it was a lot of work that we undertook. So Tarkett have always been passionate about human conscious design. It’s one of our guiding principles within the business. And what we mean by that on the in the broader sense is designing sustainably but also ensuring the products that we manufacture are suitable for the use that they’re intended for. Most of us are aware of the benefits of biophilic design as an example the impact this can have on mental health and recovery rates within hospitals. And given the sectors that we work within we wanted to learn more about the impact that design has on the built environment when it comes to both neuro-divergent and neurodegenerative conditions.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And when you’re speaking about neuro-divergent, can you be a little bit more specific as to what you are referring to in that?
Shaz Hawkins
Yeah, of course. So for us specifically within the human conscious design guide. It’s exploring what inclusive design entails, why it matters in and the different ways that we interpret the world, mainly with a focus on ADHD, autism and cause dementia as well, which falls into the category of the neurodegenerative conditions. And what became really apparent for us was that many of our customers, so architects, designers, building owners, flooring contractors, were actually desperate for more information to support them in their decision making. And that really is where our human conscious design principles guide, which we have now was born from, right in a nutshell, it’s designing for life. That’s what it’s about designing for life. So whether you’re going through school, with ADHD, or autism, through to going into the workplace, having that design correctly, all the way through to later life and elderly care where dementia may be prevalent, it’s really important that we, we understand the human process, really.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And so this initiative came about from the marketplace itself, and then was developed? And I know part of that development was with Kevin Gordon of virtual reality empathy platform or VR-EP who we talked to a couple of months ago on the podcast. And apparently, some of the key elements to the design of this flooring was pattern or lack of it, enhanced 3D perception and the opportunity to encourage movement, which I found particularly interested, so interesting, rather. So I mean, most people who work in this area are already familiar with the best practice regarding lack of pattern for dementia specifically, but can you explain to the listeners how flooring can enhance 3D perception for people with dementia?
Shaz Hawkins
Right, so one of the sensory issues of dementia is that it can have a huge impact on the person’s perception of their surroundings, sometimes leaving them unable to relate what they see to physical reality or to perceive objects in 3D. And colours are perceived differently. And for anyone listening who has experienced our virtual reality platform, which I think you may have seen yourself, there’s a really bright wall. And the moment that you switch that dementia filter on, it turns with very pale grey. And with this kind of inaccuracy of colour perception, you can imagine the difficulty to see in 3D, particularly if the colours have a similar light reflectance value. And this causes all manner of problems, just the simple task of getting about its impacted. So a contrast on a floor could look like a step or a really shiny floor could look like it’s wet. And you can see how those living with dementia then reluctant to move about or may fall more frequently. So the way we can enhance 3D perception through flooring is when we consider can contrast correctly. And we design a finish with a with a matte surface, obviously all the while meeting all the technical safety standards for that particular area of the building. And it’s really important that we look at that because it does either encourage or discourage movement and at the end of the day keeps residents in a care home safe.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So this is also the light reflected value difference between the walls and the flooring, for example…
Shaz Hawkins
Everything door handle to door and a handrail on a wall to the to the wall that it sits behind a an armchair to the floor it any anything that you want to show a contrast of and a discern a difference and that 3D perception, you need an LRV difference of 30 or more
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, and I know within my own private practice. For Park Grove design, we’ve got a couple of LRV metres and we tend to use 30 as the as the baseline for that differentiation. So what you’re saying, if I understand it correctly, is the 3d perception is directly tied into encouraging movement. In other words, if your floor and your walls were a similar colour, someone could just walk into the wall.
Shaz Hawkins
Yeah, yeah. And don’t get me wrong. Sometimes we want to discourage movement. So as an example, if you have got a storeroom as an example, I mean store rooms and medical rooms are always going to be kept locked, aren’t they? But if you were to have a door storeroom door or a medical room door, make sure it’s got the same LRV value as the wall that it sits in because that way that person’s not going to want to be a they’re probably not going to notice it if they’re dementia is prevalent, and it can also stop people trying to well we You know, with the circadian rhythm can be knocked out with dementia. So wandering takes place quite a lot, there may be areas of the building that you don’t want the person to actually wander through to. So you may want to look to discourage movement as well.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, and I know on some projects we interviewed some people in, in France at the beginning of the year, and they were actually controlling movement within the entire site by the amount of light. So where they didn’t want people with dementia to wander, when they were up in the middle of the night, they just made it dark. But that was that was in an exterior situation, not a safety situation within the interior. So when you were developing these dementia-friendly floors, you mentioned the matte surface, were there any other considerations that you use such as the softness, the cleaning, what other aspects came into the design of these particular products for dementia,
Shaz Hawkins
As you’ve just explained it, so obviously, the look and feel itself so depending on the design of it… what’s really interesting, we say that sometimes we think as designers because we’re doing dementia care, it has to be a real plain design, it doesn’t, you can actually have a woodgrain as long as the colour tones that you have in there have a similar LRV and not too distinctive and you’re not highlighting knots. So there is there is the actual design itself, the colours, the pigments that we’re using. That obviously there’s the cleanability element of it. So if you’re if you’re using a vinyl floor, one of the reasons you’re probably opting for that is you need more of a resilient surface and you want it to be easily cleaned of course, The matte finish is really important. As we’ve already explained, we don’t want it to look shiny. But the other thing with the with the finish of the floor. And what type of finish you have is not overstated. So some resilient floors are actually repairable so without as an example you can dry buffed them, you can bring them back to life. They don’t. Yeah, honestly, you don’t require wax and polish because the last thing that we want to do in that situation is to have a floor that needs wax and polish because often it does leave that surface looking a lot shinier. So if we can create products and floor finishes that can be dry, buffed, that doesn’t make them look shinier, that actually repairs them as it goes. And that means they last longer, so less disruption to patient care, and less cost when it comes to refurbishment. All of those things help create a really good balanced environment.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And presumably no downtime on the dry buffing, whereas with a wet product you would have downtime.
Shaz Hawkins
24 to 48 hours isn’t it that we normally see but you’re right with dry buffing, you have a machine and you can actually I’ve been into many hospitals, they leave their wards open and they’re just going along with the drying buffing machine because it’s not leaving a wet floor behind it’s totally safe.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
What about the acoustic properties of vinyl flooring as opposed to other surfaces as it relates to dementia flooring specifically? Are there any aspects of that which had been picked up in this development?
Shaz Hawkins
Yes of course. I mean, acoustics has a huge role to play not just in dementia design, but also with them with autism as well. So it is a fine balance of getting good acoustic properties in the floor, which obviously can be achieved in a vinyl. But what you also need to be quite cautious of is it probably sounded quite technical here but like the rolling loads, so if you’ve got an acoustic floor or a softer surface, because normally with an acoustic vinyl, you’re using a foam backing, backing of some sort, that obviously makes the floor a lot softer. And if you think of as porters in a healthcare environment as an example, having to push patients in their beds through to theatres or back through to the ward, the softer the floor, you have the impact, the rolling load is harder, so it’s more pressure on the body. So it’s a real fine balance of getting the right impact sound reduction, the right acoustic properties, but also making sure that the person’s comfort is has also been taken into consideration as well.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And it’s not hard to move on the floor. For example, if somebody had a rollater or a walker…it’s too soft, they get stuck!
Shaz Hawkins
If you think of safety floor as well because the UK we love our safety floor. It pretty much goes into most areas. If you think about an older person and maybe more hunched, shuffling, not picking up their feet, as well as a younger person might be. There’s all of those things to consider.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Is there a specific DB rating that you try to hit on these on these floors.
Shaz Hawkins
So we’re always looking at 18-19. And above, with our floors, some of them, we obviously do have some options that are a bit lower. But obviously, there’s legislation and all countries have a slightly different rating that they look for.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So you were saying that this came out of the marketplace with people asking for more information. And I know, you’ve also developed, in addition to the human conscious design principles, you’ve also developed an Age Care white paper for additional information in the sector, did that also come from the marketplace? Or was that just a, an initiative that Tarkett decided, you know, we can really add, add information here.
Shaz Hawkins
it was kind of twofold, actually. So back in, I think it was around 2013. Now Tarkett, acquired a company called Tandis. You may have heard of them, they’re the manufacturer of a product called Powerbond, which is in a pervious carpet, really popular within the care home environment, obviously for the reasons that you’re aware of. So that kind of opened the door to, to the care home environment for Tarkett. We were already doing some business, but obviously, that really did open the door. And we knew as a as a wider business operating in so many countries that we may have not had all of the detail and all of the expertise in the field. So we decided to rectify that we carried out as much research as possible. We interviewed specialists, we work with clinicians, we went to the care homes themselves. We worked with international organisations too. And we learned a great deal, which initially was to pass on to sales consultants that were that were sort of supporting the market. And what they fed back to us was that the A and D community were really interested in the information that we’ve gathered as well. And so we decided to create the white paper to share the knowledge to provide the support that was clearly needed, and fundamentally ensures that the care homes that are designed the way they should be and that they’re fit for purpose as well. So it really came from that, if I’m honest,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Right, and we’re going to put a link to that information as well as information about the human conscious design principles, and the dementia products on the podcast page for this episode of the Third Age design podcast. Another perhaps even more surprising development, if you don’t mind me saying so is sustainability. Not because sustainability itself should be surprising, it should be obviously the direction of travel. But when you’re thinking about vinyl, sustainability is not actually the first thing that pops into your mind. No, without giving away any trade secrets. How do you do that?
Shaz Hawkins
Okay, so you’re right, vinyl flooring is definitely not the first thing that springs to mind when you think about a sustainable floor finish, but actually it really depends on whose floor you’re talking about, so it will probably surprise a lot of your listeners that at Tarkett we started recycling our vinyl floors back in the 1950s. No, honestly, yes, we were the first company to look into recycling floors. Yeah, with our homogeneous floors back in the 50s. It started in Sweden, no surprise being an audit company given where their sustainability stances. So we started investigating it back then and recycling floors on a much smaller scale then to what we’re doing now. So we have our restart programme. And it’s supported by eight in house recycling facilities that are around the world. And we recycle all of our production waste, and also take back and recycle post installation and post use floors. It’s our goal. And this is a fundamental goal to our business, that none of our floor finishes end up in landfill incineration. That’s what we don’t want to happen. We want the customers that we work with to send it back to us to allow us to use it in the production of new floors. The only way around this is getting to a circular economy, not a linear economy. And the benefits of vinyl is the endless number of times that it can be recycled. There is so much PVC out there that if we were to just say, we’re not going to work with it anymore, it’s bad. We’re wasting a resource. So our goal is to bring back our floor to put it into our production process and create new floors reducing the need for raw material. We also work with other industries and use their waste material. So you’re probably aware of this vinyl floor requires calcium carbonate. Our calcium comes from existing ash piles and is produced in in the carbon capture with using carbon capture technology as well. And all of our vinyl floors have recycled content. In them, I mean, our latest floor that we launched last month IQ oop,L it actually contains 70% recycled material, which is incredible. And we don’t need to an intense stop there, we’re going to take it further.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And, how do people coordinate getting that carpet back to you at the end of its useful life in order to put it back into the process.
Shaz Hawkins
So literally, when when our consultants are out there and talking to customers, we talk to them about our restock programme, we make them aware and in what it entails in sending we have our restart bags, which are big tonne bags, we’ve got smaller if it’s a smaller project, we send that to site and when are wearing the flooring contractor is either ripping up the old floor or laying down the new and we’ve got the waste material, we asked them to put them in the restart bags, they give us a call. They tell us once the bags fall, we go in there collect it, we sorted out internally, and we send it to the right recycling plant for it to be broken down and go back into our production process.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Outstanding. Outstanding. It’s an obviously the way forward but throughout the supply chain, it’s just you found a very niche way of of doing that with your own products with a crystal ball Shaz, what do you think in addition to recycling and the reuse of materials? What do you think the future of flooring looks like for this particular sector? What would you like to see personally.
Shaz Hawkins
I think personally, I would just like I would like to see closer collaboration and supportive relationships between kind of the supply chain and demand sector. So the manufacturing and the demand sectors, I think we all have a part to play in the design of the built environment. And it’s only by working together, will we I think we’ll ever achieve what we need to it’s like we need our customers to keep sending back off laws and not just letting it go to going elsewhere. There’s some there’s some really exciting things that we’re working on. For Yeah, hopefully we get to make the difference that we want to make.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That’s fantastic Shaz, thank you so much for being my guest on the podcast today.
Shaz Hawkins
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Lori.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And you’ll find links to the torque hat human conscious design principles, dementia specific flooring, and sustainability information on the podcast page for this episode at www Third Age Dot Design. Research conducted on the US populations of people over the age of 65 and above shows that over half of these people have at least some familiarity with artificial intelligence. Today on our innovation spotlight, we’d like to direct you to a fascinating article in Forbes magazine, which says that we should not assume a lack of understanding of AI in older people. And in fact, there are several clear benefits specifically for this population, among them wearables and remote monitoring technology, which can help people predict when they might even require more acute care. And also to help combat loneliness. The US Surgeon General has actually coined the phrase ‘loneliness epidemic’ in the United States among older citizens. Social isolation can be combated with virtually assistants or chatbots, in which people can engage in conversations or even play games. There are even AI apps designed to improve the quality of life for people with conditions including Alzheimer’s. You’ll find links to some of this research on the podcast page for this episode at www.Third Age Dot Design. And this is also a topic we’re going to be discussing in greater detail in the future. A quick check of our TAD International Events Calendar tells us that the senior living Innovation Forum is taking place from the ninth to the 11th of June in Palm Springs, California USA. Don’t worry, they have air- conditioning there in June. And that same month from the 26th to the 28th of June, Broad Beach in Queensland, Australia is going to hold the National Retirement Living Summit 24 And it’s winter there in June so there’s no problem with the temperature either! You’ll find more information and additional events on the International Events page at Third Age Dot Design. Thank you to today’s special guests Shaz Hawkins of Tarkett, to our sponsors Wssner-Bosserhoff. Elevate nursing care with intelligent beds from Wissner-Bosserhoff, blending modern day smart care technology with comfort and empowering caregivers worldwide. Thank you also to our editor and 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 to you for listening. Next month I’ll be joined by Professor Emeritus Paul Eshelman from Cornell University in the United States to discuss an extremely important topic, designing for end- of- life-care. I’m Lori Pinkerton-Rolet, and I do hope you’ll join me.