Kinplace

Designing sustained intergenerational connection through shared everyday life.

ROLE
Service Designer

SKILLS
User Research, Service Blueprint, Stakeholder Co-creation

TIMELINE
Feb 2025 -> July 2025

TEAM
Kate Winbaum

Living Together, Better.

Kinplace explores how intergenerational living can reshape the way people across generations connect and interact in everyday life. Through shared homes, Kinplace helps nurture empathy and understanding between people at different life stages.

The Context

In the UK, independence is widely valued across the life course.

Young people are encouraged to move out and establish their own lives. Older adults often choose to remain in their homes, valuing autonomy over reliance on family. Over time, this emphasis on independence shapes a way of living in which generations are largely separated.

Reflecting on these challenges brought me back to how I had grown up: in a multigenerational household.

When I was young, my grandparents cared for me, and as I grew older, I supported them in return. Our relationship deepened through shared daily life and a sense of mutual responsibility.

This led me to wonder

How might we support meaningful, lasting connections between people of different generations in the UK?

The Solution — Kinplace

Kinplace is a service I designed that centers shared everyday life as a way to support lasting connection across agelines. The following research shaped this direction by examining how intergenerational connection currently takes shape in the UK, and where existing approaches begin to fall short.

Understanding the Problem

To understand how intergenerational connection currently takes shape in the UK, I interviewed expert practitioners working in intergenerational initiatives, ageing, and community-based support:

Alongside this, I spoke with people across age groups about their lived experiences and reviewed intergenerational models in the UK and abroad. I then worked with this material through two complementary tools.

A conceptual landscape was used to map the key elements shaping intergenerational living.
An affinity map then helped to surface recurring patterns in lived experience.
Emerging Patterns
01.  Short-term interactions rarely lead to deeper understanding

“I’ve taken part in organized visits and short programs before, but it’s hard to truly get to know someone when it ends so quickly.”

Most intergenerational efforts are structured as brief, one-off encounters. These formats rarely create the conditions for people to get beyond surface-level interaction or challenge the stereotypes they may hold about other generations.

02.  Age alone flattens the nuance of everyday life

“People get grouped as ‘elderly,’ but a 60-year-old and a 70-year-old are in completely different places in life.”

In intergenerational practice, age is often used to predict people’s abilities and needs, even when those assumptions don’t hold. As a result, services struggle to reflect the individuality and nuance of real people.

03.  Reciprocity shapes whether relationships feel sustainable

“People want to feel useful. They want to feel like they’re contributing something, not just being taken care of.”

Many people expressed hesitation toward arrangements that framed support as one-directional. What resonated instead was the ability to participate actively and feel valued for what they could offer.

Together, these patterns reveal why intergenerational connection often struggles to deepen, despite genuine interest.
Questions Shaping the Service
  • How might we design intergenerational connection beyond one-off encounters?
  • How might we avoid reducing people to their age when designing for connection?
  • How might we design connection so people feel they are contributing, not just receiving?
Design Direction
Connection built over time

Understanding and connection grows stronger over time. The service supports relationships that develop gradually, shaped by everyday interactions.

Life stages, not age alone

Life stages offer a more meaningful way to understand how people live. The service caters toward each individual's routines, capacities, and current needs.

Shared participation

Relationships are more sustainable when they are two-way. The service supports shared contribution and agency, allowing everyone involved to feel purposeful.

Meet Kinplace

A service that brings people at different life stages into shared homes, where connection grows through everyday interaction and mutual support. Here’s how it works.

An in-person starting point

Kinplace begins in everyday community spaces where people of different ages already spend time. There, a Kinplace host introduces the service and helps people explore whether this way of living could fit into their lives.

In doing so, Kinplace builds on existing intergenerational presence and grounds the service in conversation before digital tools come into play.

Specify your needs & offerings

Everyone joins Kinplace as both a giver and a receiver. When  creating a profile, users outline both what they need and what they can offer to someone else.

This mutual framing helps avoid power imbalances and supports relationships where each person feels they bring something meaningful to the exchange.

The right level of exchange

Kinplace supports a range of arrangements. Some matches exchange support for housing, while others include a modest monthly rent as part of the agreement.

Rather than prescribing a single model, the service allows people to choose what works for them and define clear expectations up front, with every exchange based on mutual agreement.

Thoughtful Matching

Matches are shaped by alignment in daily life rather than age alone. Routines, expectations, capacities, and current priorities are considered together, allowing intergenerational connections to emerge naturally rather than being prescribed.

AI-assisted matching helps surface this alignment across profiles to create pairings that are more likely to work in practice.

Allowing relationships to unfold

Good living arrangements take time to develop. Each match begins with a trial period, giving people space to get to know one another before committing.

If both choose to continue, they move forward into shared living, gradually building a rhythm through everyday life, mutual support, and companionship.

Designing for Life over Time

Kinplace is designed to remain relevant throughout a person’s life. No matter what life stage someone is in, it is there to support shared living and connection in a way that fits their current needs and capacity. The same service can be encountered again as people’s circumstances, capacities, and roles change.

The Life Moments

These personas represent different life moments someone may live through. They are not fixed identities, but examples of how engagement with Kinplace can shift across a lifetime.

The Newcomer

New to a city or phase of life, often lacking a support system and navigating unfamiliar language. Seeking stability, while offering time, practical skills, and companionship.

The Young Family

Balancing growing responsibilities in everyday life. Seeking practical help and shared presence, while offering an active and welcoming household.

The Empty Nester

Having more time and space after children move out. Seeking connection and opportunities to learn something new. Offering a stable home and life experience.

The Elder

Later in life, with a stable home and deep local knowledge built over time. Offering lived experience and a sense of home, while seeking connection and light support as they age in place.

This user journey illustrates one possible Kinplace match, a newcomer and an elder.

The elder provides a home and the kind of guidance that comes from lived experience, helping the newcomer orient themselves in an unfamiliar place. The newcomer brings companionship and help with small tasks around the home, contributing to daily life and shared responsibility.

In this match, support moves both ways

Kinplace supports these relationships as mutual arrangements, where both people contribute in different but equally meaningful ways.

LOOKING AHEAD

A Model for Intergenerational Living in the UK

By creating real opportunities for people to live and age together, Kinplace helps intergenerational connection take root in everyday life. The idea resonated with organisations working in intergenerational practice, including United for All Ages and Homeshare UK.

These practitioners recognised Kinplace as a natural extension of existing efforts, and has collaborated with us to develop an early proposal on how Kinplace might get off the ground.

Growing Kinplace Over Time

Crawl – Lay the Foundations

Kinplace would begin by forming partnerships with community organisations, councils, and intergenerational groups already embedded in local contexts. This stage focuses on aligning expectations, defining responsibilities, and preparing the service to operate within existing local structures.

Walk – Support Early Pairs

From there, Kinplace would support a small number of shared living arrangements. Rather than prescribing how these relationships should work, the service would help pairs talk through expectations, daily rhythms, and what support might look like in practice.

Run – Scale with Intention

As pilot matches unfold, Kinplace would adapt the service based on reflections from participants about compatibility, frictions, and how the service can better support future pairings.

Over time, these insights would inform AI-assisted matching, allowing Kinplace to more accurately identify alignment across profiles. With a more refined service model in place, Kinplace could gradually support more pairings and expand through deeper partnerships, such as the Homeshare UK network.

The Impact
Kinplace addresses a gap in how intergenerational connection is currently supported.

Over time, it has the potential to make shared living across generations feel less like an intervention and more like a natural part of how communities function.

This project captures a moment in the work, leaving space for Kinplace to be revisited and developed beyond the scope of this thesis.

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