The Longevity Economy by Joseph F. Coughlin

Author:Joseph F. Coughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

Designing Transcendence

Beyond the importance of mental models, there’s another lesson to be learned from BMW’s experience with iDrive: it’s possible to address accessibility or mental-model issues in such an intuitive, pleasing way that everyone benefits—even young, nondisabled people.

“Accessible design” is the term for building things so that people with disabilities can use them. A wheelchair ramp to one side of a stairway is an example of an accessible design feature. Design decisions that help everyone, meanwhile—both those with and without disabilities—are known as “universal design.” (Variants of the term include “design for all” and “inclusive design.”) A classic example is a lever-style door handle that can be operated with an elbow, prosthesis, residual limb, arthritic hand—even a knee. Accessible and universal design features are essential in any society that aspires to be both functional and humane.

But there’s another, even higher level of accessibility that I believe has been mistakenly lumped in with universal design: transcendent design. It’s essentially universal design that has been dialed up to 11 on a 10-point scale, with accessibility attributes so useful that they turn out to be highly desirable—even aspirational—for people with and without disabilities. If the defining, narrative-shaping forces in our older future will be those that make it easy for older adults to achieve their jobs as consumers, transcendent products and design features will be at the vanguard of this process.

A product can achieve transcendence in one of two ways. In the first, less common example, someone designs something explicitly for older people or for people with a specific disability, and it turns out to make life better for everyone.

One evening in 1988, Betsy Farber, an avid cook, was peeling potatoes.* She suffered from arthritis in her wrists, which didn’t bother her too much—except, of course, whenever she needed to get something done with her hands, especially in the kitchen. As Stanford’s Dev Patniak recounts in his book Wired to Care, the peeler in Farber’s hand that night was endowed with a keen blade, but its narrow, slippery, cylindrical handle kept spinning in her compromised grasp. Noticing her frustration, Sam, her husband, came over and peeled the potato for her.

Pause this quiet domestic tableau and consider: all too often, insights gained in everyday moments of frustration like these float away like dandelion seeds on the winds of everyday concerns and fatigue. Even if the frustrated party discovers a way to fix the issue, she hardly ever gets the opportunity to enact her solution on a wide scale—especially if the idea is a business innovation. We’ve discussed what happens in an economy structured to prioritize the ideas of young men: young people, mostly male, continue fixing the problems they see, and as a result, older people, mostly women, are forced to interact with the world (and compete in a harsh labor market) with only substandard tools to help them.

According to the conventional rules, what the Farbers, both retired at the time, were supposed to do when that potato peeler failed them was this: grimace. Worry about their continued ability to do things in their home.

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