Experience Exchange wins DBA challenge

Congratulations to the team behind www.sageandonions.com who yesterday won the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge with an initiative to encourage people of all ages to trade experiences and skills.

The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge is an annual design competition to create a mainstream product, service, environment or communication which can be enjoyed by people of all abilities. Now in its 10th year, the Challenge was launched by the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre in collaboration with the Design Business Association (DBA) as a creative response to the poor levels of design of goods and services aimed at older and disabled people, a significant and growing group as the population ages.

This year’s brief was entitled Active Ageing – designing for our future selves and looked at the challenges of our growing ageing population remaining active and productive in later life.

Creative consultancy, Clinic came up with the idea of The Experience Exchange whereby people of all ages would swap skills and experience, rather like projects such as freecyle. Groups would be set up locally and people would be encouraged to attend events to get to know each other and identify experiences which could be swapped. It is thought that this idea would be most likely to attract people with time but not necessarily money, such as the retired but also parents with young children and students. So for example, one person could swap cooking skills for help with car maintenance.

An interesting idea. I found when setting up my business that experienced people are usually really pleased to be asked for advice and many have been very generous with their time and expertise. So, I for one, can see that, with the right sort of organisational framework, this could work.