Effectively applying environmental psychology principles and theories to the design of senior living settings can powerfully enhance the quality of life for residents. Whether you're working as a designer of a new senior residential care facility, an administrator of an existing facility, or within the senior healthcare field, you can use the research to inform decisions about design choices for the space. This relatively new science addresses not only how human beings perceive their surroundings, but the ways in which good design can optimize people's interactions with the physical world.

In this course, you will examine how psychological factors affect our relationship to the environment in senior living facilities and reflect on how well those factors are being applied in a real-life setting. You'll explore how to apply environmental psychology principles to the design of senior living facilities. You'll conduct an online literature review to help inform your design of senior living facilities. To help you better understand the challenges seniors face so that you can design to address those challenges, you'll participate in a hands-on exercise where you simulate the physical limitations that occur naturally in the aging process and then reflect on your experience.