Theme: “After the Pandemic: Designing the Next Version of Our World”
More than a world and a half away, it seems, since the 8th Stanford Longevity Design Challenge theme was announced in May 2020. As the COVID world continues with all its twists and turns (social, economic and political), the lead title After the Pandemic somehow stands yet, a far distant promise. With Stanford’s goal, hope is encouraged by a call to imagine how we might adapt and design as our future rolls on; and I would propose it is really a series of next versions of our world.
Over the years, this Design Challenge has evolved. If you look at the previous themes and challenge winners from 2013 to 2015 for example, the technology designs tended to focus on supporting the needs of older adults; such as in 2015 – Memoir Monopoly, a tablet-based rehabilitation game platform for elders in dementia care and City Cart, a walker/cart hybrid designed to help users with mobility issues safely and easily make shopping trips.
However, the messaging that may have been unheard or overlooked in the Stanford Design Challenge is the phrase “across the lifespan”, threaded in the 2014 theme. By 2017 the theme spoke to “promoting lifelong habits”, elevating to “designing for inter-generational impact” in 2018. This upholds the notion that longevity is not something you claim awareness of when you are suddenly at an advanced older age.
As Stanford would thus have you think it – Longevity is a journey; and if you run with that premise, a journey often comes with a map, or at least a sketch of a map, which through life it will see several points of change and transition, and present many options for direction. For the 2020 Design Challenge, Stanford asked design entrants to consider their new Center on Longevity project that kicked off in 2018: A New Map of Life – After the Pandemic.
If you go to another link on the Design Challenge Overview page you’ll find an invitation to sign in on, a virtual idea board if you will, where you can share your perspective on how you might “experience a sense of purpose, belonging, and worth at all stages of life.” Great, but I don’t see anything posted since last August and what is there are mostly articles from a select few sources.
In the end, what made the 2020/21 Design Challenge different was the emphasis on how the COVID pandemic has, in its first long phase, changed our lives more broadly beyond the lives of older adults. As a reminder the student designers were asked to create well-designed, practical solutions that improve well-being across the lifespan.
Considering how COVID had altered various aspects of daily life for anyone at any age, here were three sample questions put to design teams:
- If remote work is to become more common, are there ways in which we can re-invigorate local community connections as people spend more time at home?
- How can more people of any age access quality education from anywhere?
- What are the best ways for different generations to connect when they live apart?
Winners this year clearly addressed these questions. Third place – WULU a chatbot that provides a safe space for adolescents to seek mental health and gender-related help and resources. Second place – PhoneBook a 3D-printed electronic device that transforms a smartphone into a laptop computing experience. First place – Foris Labs An offline platform that simulates a science lab for high school students, in which they can perform individual or group experiments.
Every year with my limited access and research to information on the finalists, for fun I pick my top three choices, and this year I missed the mark entirely, I went for something that focused on helping children keep active while at the same time it would help their parents in that endeavour. Check out Acties an app to motivate children to do daily exercises at home using an “advent-calendar”-like reward system.
If Stanford moves fast like they did early on last year, we will soon hear of the 2021/22 Design Challenge and I look forward to seeing how they elevate the Challenge in their next theme. As we continue to face a COVID world’s evolving social and health issues over the next number of years, in combination with the impact of climate change and an unrelenting flow of international migration of people of all ages, how will the promise of longevity for everyone be further challenged?