Reflecting on the saying, “Art is long, life is short,” industrial designer Ayse Birsel, co-founder and creative director of Birsel + Seck, a design and innovation studio, kicked off the 2022 Environments for Aging Conference on Sunday, April 3, with a message to attendees that life isn’t as short any more. “We’re here now at the forefront of designing for a long life,” she said during her opening keynote, “Designing for Life.”
A few years ago, Birsel, whose career includes creating products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies as well as authoring the book “Design the Life You Love,” a step-by-step guide to building a meaningful future, turned her skills toward designing a better life for people as they age.
One of her first projects was with Amazon to co-design with older adults and their caregivers to gain an understanding of seniors’ often overlooked or unheard needs and wants. This eventually led to work on the same topic with The SCAN Foundation, an independent public charity focused on transforming care for older adults. The one-and-a-half-year research program involved seniors across the U.S. and asking the men and women participating, “How would you like to design your life?”
Noting that most research that had come before had a reductionist viewpoint about older adults, she said she heard the opposite from participants during her studies. “What we found was that people had a very expansionist point of view,” she says.
Furthermore, Birsel noted that people are the masters of their lives at least twice—during their 20s when they first leave home and again in their 50s and 60s when they enter retirement or after they’ve done much of what’s been expected out of life. “This is a great moment to explore what we want out of this life,” she said.
To help guide older adults through this transition, Birsel said it’s important to design a “long runway” that allows time for people to adjust to changes—something that’s especially important today as seniors life longer and can experience decades more of living after retirement. “Seniors are long-life astronauts,” she said. “They’re going where no one else has gone before.”
Another guiding principle to consider, she noted, is the concept of “same different,” or the idea that what older adults want isn’t that much different from what other populations want—love, vitality, work, and friendship. The difference is what seniors need to get them.
For example, Birsel noted that seniors may have old friends and fresh, or new, friends. “Friendships can be made,” she said. To help foster these relationships, senior living communities can create “friendship factories,” such as shared spaces or hubs of interest, where seniors can gather to meet or learn new activities together.
Considering a sense of purpose, she said early in life people’s sense of purpose is ready made because of social constructs, such as school or career and family expectations. As we age, Birsel said that many people learn to create a self-made purpose—which many seniors view as a welcome opportunity. Sharing anecdotes from her research, she said one participant told her, “Starting something new is feeling young again,” while another said, “This is the perfect time for making stuff happen.”
To that point, Birsel said as she began working on her next book, “Design the Long Life You Love,” she originally thought her target audience was for older adults before realizing the lessons can be applicable to everyone.
“These users [seniors] are resilient, adaptable, pioneering experts of life,” she said. “When we solve for them, we solve for everyone.”
Anne DiNardo is executive editor of Environments for Aging magazine. For more on the EFA Conference, visit environmentsforaging.com.
