By Aishwarya Edakhe and Shagun Malavia, Co-Founders, House of Tomorrow

In 2020, we graduated from our master’s program straight into a pandemic. Like most of the world, we spent those first months looking outward at case counts, at a threat arriving from beyond our front doors. But shut inside our homes, worrying about the people we loved, we each arrived at the same uncomfortable observation, one we recognised in each other the moment we said it aloud: the danger we feared most wasn’t really out there. For the elderly on our minds, it was inside our own homes. And the room we worried about most was the one we were least equipped to help with, because it was the most private. Every time a grandparent took a few minutes longer than usual behind a closed washroom door, our minds ran through the worst. But how do you help in a space where dignity depends on being left alone? That question, asked and re-asked through months of lockdown, is where Inloo began. Now a patented, non-electric, self-lifting toilet attachment we spent two years designing. It’s also where House of Tomorrow, as a company, began not long after. This post is about a decision we made early on and have defended stubbornly since: we chose not to call what we built a medical device.

The Problem Is Not Ageing

There is a particular kind of invisibility that descends on a person the moment they reach for a walker. It isn’t the walker itself it’s what it announces. In Indian homes, where identity is woven into the ability to fulfil one’s role to move through the kitchen unassisted, to use the bathroom without calling for help, assistive objects carry a weight that far exceeds their physical form. In the eyes of many users, they are markers of a life in retreat. The problem, we came to believe, is a design culture that has surrounded ageing with clinical aesthetics and institutional logic. Inloo became the evidence for a larger argument: that care can be embedded invisibly into everyday life through design, when that design is practised with empathy.

Between 2021 and 2024, we ran three community demonstration sessions in Pune, India. Rather than facilitated interviews, we set up a live prototype in a shared common space and let people approach it on their own terms, then invited written feedback on cards in their own hand. A few moments from those sessions have stayed with us. Participants tried the product without being shown a sign or any help. That conveyed the plug-and-play idea was legible without explanation. Adult children who accompanied elderly parents spoke less about how the product worked and more about the peace of mind it could give them when they weren’t home. The use cases we hadn’t imagined kept surfacing unprompted: one participant suggested stair support, another raised portable toilets, a caregiver pointed out it could be installed for visiting parents and packed away afterward. One exchange has stayed with us longest. A domestic worker at the third session asked simply, “Can cleaning be easier?” It was a question from someone who would maintain the space Inloo lived in, not someone who would use it and it reminded us how much gets missed when feedback comes only from the people a product is designed for. We didn’t just ask whether the prototype worked. We asked whether people would actually want it visible in their home and if not, what would need to change. That second question generated our most useful insights. It’s one thing for a product to function. It’s another for someone to invite it into the space that holds their sense of self.

Solving the Function Problem and Missing the Dignity One

Our first working prototype, built in early 2021, worked mechanically. Users told us the support felt “natural,” not like assistance but like a feature of the toilet itself. That language mattered; it meant the product had crossed into invisibility. But the same prototype had a visible mechanism and several users said they wouldn’t be comfortable with it in a shared bathroom or one visible to guests. One participant put it plainly: it looked “like something from a hospital.” We’d solved the functional problem and failed the dignity one. The iterations that followed focused almost entirely on that failure. We worked through several formal revisions until participants started describing the product as looking “like a premium toilet seat” rather than an assistive device.

Solving the Function Problem and Missing the Dignity One

Our first working prototype, built in early 2021, worked mechanically. Users told us the support felt “natural,” not like assistance but like a feature of the toilet itself. That language mattered; it meant the product had crossed into invisibility. But the same prototype had a visible mechanism and several users said they wouldn’t be comfortable with it in a shared bathroom or one visible to guests. One participant put it plainly: it looked “like something from a hospital.” We’d solved the functional problem and failed the dignity one. The iterations that followed focused almost entirely on that failure. We worked through several formal revisions until participants started describing the product as looking “like a premium toilet seat” rather than an assistive device.

Why the Framing Was the Point

Products designed to look like consumer objects rather than medical equipment don’t just serve the person using them. Over time, they shift how ageing itself is understood culturally, not just individually. Designing Inloo as a lifestyle product rather than a medical device was never just a marketing choice. It was an argument about what dignity requires. Independence where the ability to manage your own body in your own home without asking for help isn’t a luxury. Our field research told us, repeatedly, that it’s the foundation of how people relate to their families and to their own ageing. Design that protects that independence isn’t comfort design. It’s design justice. We designed Inloo for our grandparents. We’re designing House of Tomorrow for our future selves.