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Page 2 "For good, bad, or indifferent, the baby boomers remain the me generation," Coughlin says. "It's a selfish generation that has had schools, sidewalks, subways, houses, and even marketing redesigned for them. Somehow I don't see that as they age they're going to drop these expectations. They're not going to be old the way our grandparents were, which was to accept that old age meant lack of mobility and activity, and there was nothing they could do about it. They're not even going to accept moving to Arizona and Florida and playing golf every day." If the world's new and future seniors are no longer willing to go gently into their good night, then designers will have to pay more attention to their specific needs if they are to capture a share of this increasingly significant consumer sector. This doesn't mean a dumbing down at the drawing board for the technophobic or media challenged. "The fastest-growing sector of Internet users is women over fifty seeking health-care information," Coughlin says. "This proves that all people will learn how to deal with technology when that technology offers them something of use. As far as seniors allegedly being unable to master computer or electronic skills, I wouldn't call that technophobia. I'd call that bad technology." For AgeLab's designers, creating products and services for older people requires the same aesthetic sensibilities as designing for Generation X. "Just because you're designing an environment for someone who goes out into space, it doesn't necessarily need to look like a machine," says Trotti, who early in his career worked on housing for the elderly and physically disabled. "The same holds true for designing an environment for an older person. His home or office doesn't have to look like a hospital. In fact, it shouldn't look like a hospital." Steve Opie, a footwear designer who with Carrie Bettencourt cotaught the RISD-MIT Active Aging Design Studio, took 15 students on a research-and-design journey that brought them in touch with the 50-plus crowd. During the first four weeks of the semester, students reviewed industrial marketing surveys and visited health-and-fitness clubs. They also interviewed seniors and health-care workers, and met with representatives of the AARP. The research helped dispel several preconceptions about designing for both the over-50 crowd and the elderly. "Had we just started to draw, we would have had a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds designing products for a real world they had never seen or considered," says Opie who, like Coughlin, has just turned 40. "This way, we were able to show the students that they shouldn't think of us as old-brown-shoe guys. They shouldn't think that older consumers can't handle something innovative. We want stuff that's innovative. What we don't want is stuff that looks like it's made for old folks." Universal design, with its cross-age utility, does hold some interest for Coughlin and his colleagues. But AgeLab is far more focused on something Coughlin calls "universal appeal"--a quality exhibited by products, services, and homes that are as attractive as they are functional. "I would argue that the concept of universal design does not put enough emphasis on universal appeal. Moreover, the concept often treats disability and aging as the same thing. They're not. A disabled person was either born with a condition or had an event that marked their life with the disability. An older person is often in denial about the physical environment. It stays the same while the natural aging process changes them." "If you've come here to design a better handle for the bathtub, you're in the wrong course," Coughlin told the students at the RISD course when he visited the Providence, Rhode Island, campus last spring. "This course is about the new consumer, and designing for them." Still, some of the most intriguing and potentially successful products to emerge from the RISD-MIT course were conceived for seniors. "Anna Estermain, the student who came up with the Pill Pet idea, worked with the elderly and with children at a nearby Jewish Community Center," Bettencourt says. "She noticed that grandparents were buying computerized dolls for their grandchildren, but that they frequently kept them for themselves. She realized that many old people are lonely and need interaction." Pill Pet is a small fur-covered animal form made of a gel-based material with a screen in its abdomen and intelligence that can be programmed to remind its owner to eat foods rich in iron or to take a certain medication with milk. It is also cuddly and can be squeezed. Pill Pet requires a certain amount of care--it wants to know that you are responding to its reminders. The device even "dies" a simulated electronic death if its owner forgets to inform the pet that he or she has taken a medication. "The technology involved in the Pill Pet is quite simple," Coughlin says. "It's essentially an alarm. The trouble with alarms is that people eventually ignore them. They hate them, because alarms act on rational intelligence. The Pill Pet does something else: it uses affective intelligence--emotional intelligence. Getting older people to take their meds is a serious problem. But it's not a problem you can solve with a cold, impersonal engineering approach. It's a problem whose solution lies in treating a person as a mixture of intelligence, emotion, and just plain folly." Two of the most challenging--and far-reaching--sectors of AgeLab's research involve transportation and health care. "Transportation is not traveling from point A to point B," Coughlin says. "It's everything. Before you can do anything, you've got to get there. In most cases, transportation for seniors is being able to drive. Our public-transit system is not particularly comfortable for the elderly, and in most places is non-existent. For seniors, being able to drive is independence and freedom. Once you rip those wheels out, they begin to deteriorate, both mentally and physically." Some of AgeLab's transportation experiments aim at creating a smarter, safer vehicle for seniors. With Miss Daisy, a VW Beetle stripped of motor, transmission, and fluids and planted in the middle of the second-floor laboratory, AgeLab researchers experiment with sensors and screens that deliver information to the driver about route, location, and speed as well as weather, stock quotes, and potential hazards. "There is a paradox here," Coughlin says. "As the car grows more sophisticated, the aging driver has more difficulty assimilating this information. We need to ascertain a level of information that is useful and not overwhelming." In health care, Coughlin and his colleagues are less interested in developing new monitoring and therapeutic technologies than they are in integrating existing technologies into a system that will provide better coverage and communication with medical personnel. They also want to ease the increasing burden on home health-care workers. "Do you want a system to manage diabetes?" he asks. "To monitor congestive heart failure from the home? To transmit blood pressure and pulse readings from your bedroom to your doctor's office? We've got them. The question is, who's going to use these devices? Right now we pay about $7 an hour for a health-care worker to visit your house. This worker may or may not have an education or even 30 days of training and works in an industry with the highest job turnover rate and one of the highest levels of stress. And you're making his or her job easier by filling it up with stuff he or she can't understand or operate?" Coughlin's strategy to keep America's current and future seniors healthy is based on making the individual responsible for his or her own well-being while they're still healthy. This could be accomplished, he suggests, by installing a health station--an apparatus that can perform a series of medical tests--in every home. The technology is sophisticated, he says, but similar devices are already available. As with most AgeLab solutions, the trick is not in the technology, it's in the psychology of overcoming the stigma of aging. It is creating new health and lifestyle habits for the healthy that will be of even greater benefit when they hit old age. "A sixty-five-year-old baby boomer might not want to purchase this device for himself," Coughlin admits. "He might look at it as an unwelcome reminder of decline. But if you market it to him when he's much younger, get it into his house when he's forty and still living with kids who wake up with ear infections in the middle of the night and with parents who wake up with chest pains the next night, he'll see how useful it can be. And when he's old enough to need it, he'll be glad it's there." |
