Sha Yao was always very close with her late grandmother. It was a terrible blow to her when her grandma’s health began to deteriorate and there were obvious signs of dementia. This became the single most important motivation for Yao to dedicate herself to design. When her grandmother became incapable of looking after herself, Yao carefully oversaw every aspect of her daily routine. Later Yao volunteered to work in a nursing home, where “I was able to observe in detail the motions of elderly people when they eat” and where she also had many long talks with caregivers and social workers. She thought to herself that she would like to be able to design eating utensils that would be more suited to the needs of senior citizens.

Yao discovered that there are roughly 20 distinct problems for elderly people trying to eat with traditional tableware. For example, it is not easy for them to scoop up food, soup often ends up being spilled, and so on. Many seniors also have trembling, unsteady hands, and it becomes deeply embarrassing for them to continually drop their food, so much so that many prefer not to eat at all. “In fact, old people are very worried about losing face,” she states. When designing new utensils, she took into account not only ease of use, but also the dignity of the people using them.

In university, Yao had a double major in sociology and Japanese, but she discovered that what she really loves is to work with her hands. In fact, she always dreamed of being able to design something that would make the lives of others more convenient and more aesthetic. So she decided to go to graduate school to study industrial design. Because of her skill in Japanese, she originally planned to go to Japan. But in the end she did not, because she thought that since Japan mainly follows what is popular in the West, she might as well just go to the US to study, and she attended Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She was rather unusual in choosing this career path, in that most students of industrial design go into high-tech or high-end consumer industries. But because of her grandmother, she wanted to design items for daily use by senior citizens.

Yao relates that since she did not have a background in design, she had to learn everything from square one. “A drawing that would take others only an hour to produce would take me ten hours! It was exhausting for sure, but since I had made my decision that this was what I was going to do, I had to keep at it until I got results.”

Yao eventually designed a nine-piece tableware set, and chose “Eatwell” as a brand name. She hopes that if seniors suffering from dementia, and in fact anyone who faces challenges in manual dexterity, can use these utensils to “eat well,” they can enjoy both a better mood and better health.

The first thing that jumps out at you about Eatwell tableware is the bright colors. Yao explains that this is not only an aesthetic choice, but a scientific one as well. According to a study conducted at Boston University, colorful tableware can increase appetite by some 25% over plain ware. Bland-looking staple foods like rice or potatoes stand out clearly against colorful tableware, but blend into the white of traditional plates. Patients with Alzheimer’s typically have difficulty processing visual information, and according to the study many patients eat less than their full meals simply because their brains cannot properly identify the food.

The Eatwell set comprises two bowls, two cups, two cup covers, two spoons, and a tray. These nine items have been tested repeatedly by users and have been designed with tremendous attention to detail. Take the bowls for example. One is deeper, and is designed for foods with juice or broth. The other, more shallow, is for dry food. The bottoms of the bowls are not flat, but inclined, so that the food concentrates in one place and is easy to scoop up. This contrasts with flat-bottomed bowls, in which, toward the end of a meal, the remaining food becomes scattered, making it difficult for less-than-dextrous seniors to eat it.

Sha Yao (center) was awarded first prize in the Design Challenge of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, attracting worldwide attention to her work from professionals in the fields of senior living and care for patients with cognitive disorders.

As for the two cups, one is for soup and the second for tea or other beverages. The handles are curved, making them easy to grip. The cups also have extended rubber bases, so that they resist tipping over.

The most unique feature of all is the spoons. Their curved handles make them easy to grip, while the metal part is shaped to fit precisely against the curvature of the bowls, so that even seniors who are very weak or who have problems controlling their hands can get a full spoonful of food or broth with each movement. Also, the sides of the bowls are at right angles to the table surface, which helps prevent spillage.

Yao says that there are a lot of curved spoons out there on the market, but they are designed that way purely for aesthetic reasons, and are of little practical value to elderly people with dementia who generally scoop or dig food out of their bowls straight into their mouths. Food easily spills out over the edges of these general-purpose spoons, and often very little gets to the diner’s palate. This creates an extra burden on caregivers, because many patients have to be fed by hand by another person. Yao says that her designs will allow those in cognitive decline to feed themselves for the maximum possible time, keeping them more autonomous and allowing them to retain their dignity, while at the same time reducing the workload for caregivers.

Yao explains that the original idea for this design came to her while she was writing her MFA thesis at Academy of Art University, and has since been revised many times. In order to perfect the design, she did a lot of research in academic publications and also volunteered at a nursing home and a center for the elderly to observe the problems that those with dementia face when eating. She established friendly relationships with a number of care professionals (such as occupational therapists, nurses, and social workers), and absorbed a great deal of wisdom based on their workplace experiences. On top of all that, she actively participated in support groups for family members of people with cognitive impairment, learning much about the patients’ daily needs as well as the challenges faced by family members who are the primary caregivers. The result of this massive effort? “My desire to design something myself to help solve their problems just grew stronger and stronger.”

Yao’s tableware set designed specifically for use by people with dementia was awarded the top prize in the 2014 Design Challenge sponsored by the Stanford Center on Longevity. This was the first time that any student from Taiwan had ever won this honor.

Yao was presented with the award by Juliet Holt Klinger, senior director for Dementia Care and Programs at Chicago’s Brookdale Senior Living, a company that operates senior residences. Klinger remarked with great feeling that Brookdale had been searching for something like Yao’s tableware for a long time, because the corporate group’s institutional care facilities have more than 6000 patients with cognitive disorders, and just getting them three meals a day is an enormous project in itself. Klinger concluded that Eatwell designs would certainly solve many problems that people with dementia experience at mealtimes.

Eatwell’s winning of the 2014 Design Challenge instantly caught the attention of those in related institutions, and they came in droves to ask when and where they could buy this tableware. Yao decided to create a new company, which she christened “Sha Design” after her own English moniker. The first product to be produced by Sha Design will be, naturally, the Eatwell tableware set.

In November of 2014, Yao was invited to Taiwan by Silver Linings Global (which describes itself as a “social start-up” that provides international exchange, training, and marketing services) to share the concepts and ideas behind Eatwell tableware. Many senior care institutions in Taiwan showed great interest in the product line, further strengthening her confidence in the future.

Yao took the US$10,000 prize she got from Stanford, along with all her personal savings, and invested them in her company, buying materials, making models, and so on. Not surprisingly, she burned through this small amount very quickly. So she decided to go on Indiegogo, the world’s largest crowdfunding site, to raise money. She promised, “If we can only get US$70,000, then Eatwell can go into mass production.” The original deadline was set at December 31, 2014, but in fact they reached that target on December 20.

Yao is now racing to get all her ducks in a row to start manufacturing. She is not only a designer, she has become an entrepreneur as well. Although the latter job calls for a very different skill set, Yao states confidently, “What I don’t know, I can learn, so I’m not afraid.”

Raising her face to the sky, Yao softly voices a “Thank you!” to her grandmother, because that woman not only showered her with love as she grew up, she was also the inspiration behind Eatwell tableware. Though her grandmother will never be able to use these utensils, in an era when more and more people survive to advanced years, more and more people likewise will suffer from dementia, so Yao says: “I’d like to think that Eatwell will serve to help many other people, and that many people will benefit from these designs. This would be the best way to repay the love I got from my grandmother.”