As technology increasingly plays a role in improving the lives of an aging population, this paper argues that it is the role of the creative disciplines to humanise technological developments. Roger Coleman describes how the establishment of DesignAge at the Royal College of Art led to an approach which unified different fields of study: gerontology, art and design, market research, sociology, ergonomics and others. The author provides examples of cross-disciplinary projects with a ‘human-centred approach’. He concludes that the humanising of technology will always remain the province of the creative disciplines, and that to pursue this aim successfully requires a contextual and cross-disciplinary approach, not a narrow and specialised one.