Innovation Planning Project – Ageing Gracefully

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SOCIAL DESIGN | RESEARCH | INNOVATION | DESIGN THINKING

Type: Case Study

Client: Student Project for Innovation Planning Project (IPP) Module

Keywords: Ageing, Future way of Retirement, Social Design, Living Services

Setup: Group Work – this work is a collaboration of third-year students from Design Management International at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Class of 2018

My Role: Collective research to conception, prototyping and testing, on-site research lead, stakeholder contact person, team management, responsible for deadlines and milestones, joint production of documentation, shared responsibility of proofreading the class documentation

Project Time: 2 months, followed by presentations and interviews to every sub-topic

Date: 5th Semester, Autumn 2017

Introduction

While it has its challenges, ageing is an experience most humans accept as part of a long and ever-evolving life. Still, much could be done to lessen the unpleasantries and reinforce the benefits of longer life expectancies. How might design solutions improve the experience of ageing in the future? This was the focus of the following innovation planning project.

Challenge

Over the course of eight weeks, 25 Design Management students came to understand the challenges of ageing today; extrapolate needs, potential scenarios, and speculative improvements for the future; and ultimately deliver lifestyle solution concepts that support fulfilling post-retirement life.

Deliverable

There is no denying the fact that societies are ageing all over the world but there is a great deal of variety in how those increasing years can affect individual lives. Designing an ageing gracefully experience, my group and I came up with ‘The New Aging Life Cycle Model’. The new ‘Ageing Life-Cycle’ approach has committed to provide time and knowledge to live fuller and more meaningful lives throughout a lifespan. The concept for a sustainable self-caring society increases creativity, productivity, pursues passion projects and experiments. Thus, ultimately prevents loneliness and supports the process of finding the purpose in life. The new Aging Life-Cycle is for fighting the causes rather than the symptoms of the ageing process nowadays. It is not a product nor is it a service. It is a new system to a social mind-shift and education that has to be coordinated and pushed through the existing system in order to change the paradigms. Therefore we are altering the Swiss process of the civil ageing system in consideration that this approach will affect other existing processes as well. It might be the cause of money loss and hurdles in society in the short term. Nevertheless, are these drawbacks that can be taken as a loss for the sake of a long-term and sustainable solution.

Conclusion

The regular framework of life plans for the first 25 years to educate oneself followed by approximately 40 years of working. At the age of 65, one is experiencing a harsh cut and is suddenly supposed to be retired and enjoy retirement until one dies. But many retired people are facing several obstacles in their everyday life and are not satisfied. The two main obstacles are loneliness and a missing purpose of life. Thus, instead of waiting until the end of life, the new Aging Life-Cycle approach has committed providing time and knowledge to live fuller and more meaningful lives throughout a lifespan. One tends to think of taking time off as a necessity, something we must do to recharge our batteries so we can go back to being productive. But leisure is valuable on its own. It helps us expand our creativity and take our work to the next level. Thus, it is not about taking an extended amount of time off at once but finding sacred time, and discipline, daily or weekly to work on one's own projects and foster the social network. This approach is providing a mindset and occasion that tackles named issues in long-term to understand and achieve happiness and social integration throughout a lifespan. Furthermore, this notion is foreseen as an embedded mindset that enhances full integration and mix of all generations, genders, interests, backgrounds, health status, and so on. This solution approach delivers a self-curating system of human-centred paradigms through a sustainable education system and flexible solutions to enrich relationships, increase social competencies and build a caring society.
The innovation planning project course addresses the social issue of aging. This demographic shift points out technological support (e.g. robots), social inclusion to balance trend towards social isolation. From the perspective of the design discipline, social transformation issues demand a design response that requires thinking and acting beyond the traditional dominating product, service, experience, space, etc.