Theme: “After the Pandemic: Designing the Next Version of Our World”
Now in its eighth year, Stanford Center on Longevity has quickly hooked its Longevity Design Challenge 2020/21 to the pressing reality of a COVID World, just as they were announcing the winners of the 2019/20 competition in April. Considering the fact that this mammoth global pandemic is only at an early front-end stage and people around the world are still reeling in reaction and shock, it is interesting that so many entities, including Stanford, are talking “post-COVID” or in this case after the pandemic.
Optimism in the future is not to be discouraged and innovation in technology design is not to be ignored. So in helping people continue to realize a healthy promise of longevity – the usefulness of such a Longevity Design Challenge continues. Over the last seven years since I began to follow this event, it is worth noting that one essential hallmark has been recognizing and awarding creative talent from around the world.
Insightful of the future in some way, the winner from 2019/20 was from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in India – Shishu, Sui aur Dhaaga, which translates from Hindi to “Child, Needle and Thread.” This simple technology converts a common local cultural practice into an immunization tracker for infants in migration, using a version of a bracelet called a Nazar Band. How relevant that is when you consider simultaneously, the dynamics of two huge global issues – mass migration and pandemic.
It may be a long haul to a future after a pandemic and in that passage of time, new technologies respectful of basic and immediate human needs will be in high demand. In a COVID World, futuristic thinking steers us ahead and in its framing of this year’s Longevity Design Challenge, Stanford submits:
“The suddenness of this transformation is allowing us to examine daily practices, social norms, and institutions from perspectives that are rarely possible. For a short window of time, before new routines and practices replace familiar old ones, we will see with greater clarity how our lives might be improved, how current shifts could become enduring changes, what new norms might emerge, and how a new future might look.”
In light of this, what design ideas is the Stanford Challenge looking for in 2020/21? No surprise that the solutions should allow for remote or virtual access, but beyond the obvious health related issues participants are challenged here to think more broadly and come up with products, programs, or services that can be applied to enhance experiences in workplaces, schools, personal relationships, or any other aspect of life.
To guide this perspective, two examples of questions from Stanford that drew my attention were; “What are the best ways for different generations to connect when they live apart?” and “What have we learned from our change in activity about how we can reduce our impact on the environment, and how can we apply those lessons going forward?” These and any number of questions you or I might add, leave the mission wide open for the design teams.
Opening call date for the submissions to Longevity Design Challenge 2020/21 begins in September 2020 and the winners named in April 2021. In the meantime, the Stanford Center on Longevity has launched an on-line interactive project called the “New Map of Life: After the Pandemic.” Here you too can post your own perspectives in either a brief note, essay, poem, video or cartoon. Have at it.