Ayse Birsel, co-founder and creative director of design and innovation studio Birsel + Seck, has built a career creating products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies. She’s also authored the book “Design the Life You Love,” a step-by-step guide to building a meaningful future. A few years ago, inspired by her aging parents, she decided to turn her skills toward designing a better life for people as they age, gathering insight from hundreds of seniors across the country on their wants and desires.
On Sunday, April 3, Birsel will kick off the 2022 EFA Conference + Expo with the opening keynote presentation “Designing for Life,” where she’ll share lessons from into her research and ways this industry can support seniors in living lives they will love. Here, she answers a few questions from Environments for Aging about her creative process, what feedback surprised her the most, and why those living longer are optimistic about their futures.
EFA: Describe your work in 10 words or less.
Birsel: I transform people’s lives through design.
What drew you to turn your creative process to helping people feel more fulfilled as they age?
The short answer is seeing my parents age. The long answer is a few years back, I spoke at Amazon’s design conference and shared with them our studio’s growing interest in aging. They invited Birsel + Seck to work on a project with them in which we co-designed with older adults and their caregivers to design the life and care they love and gain an understanding of their often overlooked or unheard needs and wants. The goal was to design “with them, not for them.” This eventually led to our work on the same topic with The SCAN Foundation, an independent public charity focused on transforming care for older adults. Through the partnership, our firm developed and implemented a one and a half-year research program across the U.S., conducting 16 “Design the Life You Love 65+” workshops with 250 participants, including men and women from diverse areas and backgrounds. We wanted to understand their unique wants, as we helped them to reimagine the possibilities and opportunities for joy, independence, and fulfillment at this time in their lives.
What’s one thing you heard from participants that surprised you?
“If you want to understand what we want, think no further than what you want. Love, purpose, well-being, and friendship. We are the same. What’s different is our ability to access them.” They explained that as they get older and society pushes them to the sidelines, these things move further out of their reach physically, emotionally, economically, and so on.
Based on what you learned, where do you see the biggest opportunity for innovation within senior living?
Co-design, or co-creation, is about including users or customers as partners in the creative process. It helps us understand users not only through observation and interviews but also through mutual creativity and collaboration. This is exactly how we did our research on aging, which upended all of our old preconceptions on aging and led to my new book, “Design the LONG Life You Love,” to be published in December 2022.
What’s one thing our EFA attendees can expect to hear in your keynote.
None of the research participants would dispute the difficulties and challenges related to health, family, finance, and social life inherent in living longer. But they wouldn’t accept a reductionist point of view as being representative of who they are, either. They would find it old-fashioned. People today are much more optimistic about living long lives. They don’t see their lives as shrinking. Instead, they see their lives as expanding and growing. According to the very people who are leading long lives, living longer is thrilling.
Anne DiNardo is executive editor of Environments for Aging magazine. She can be reached at [email protected].
For more on the 2020 EFA Conference + Expo, including registration and schedule information, visit environmentsforaging.com.
