When you follow an event in its inaugural year, as I did in 2013/14 with the first Stanford Longevity Design Challenge, there is no sense of how well it will take off – and now like a flash, it’s the 10th Anniversary!
This year’s theme at first glance seems quite broad in scope, wide open to accept diverse innovative technology solutions from university student design teams around the world; and this is one feature that makes the Stanford event so great – its international appeal.
If you look back at the previous themes you will see how optimizing health span has served as the foundation for this design challenge event, and more recently how this event threads into the main Stanford Center on Longevityinitiative The New Map of Life which germinated in September 2018. This well framed narrative has one sobering sub-title – “we’re not ready.” Ready for what? Making the most of the potential for a 100 Year Life.
Follow the bouncing ball. Inspiration can be found for all this in the landmark 2016 bookThe 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevityby Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott. If we’re not ready what that means is that longevity and a healthy life span is not a guarantee, but a promise to aspired to – a life course journey, “living well at every age”. And the bouncing ball takes us to that other global initiative – the UNDecade of Healthy Ageing 2021-2030.
So we have a script for this global narrative, and more than one organization, or individual voice is taking on this challenge of what I call “recoding a longevity society”, which includes improving our global health systems. As Stanford New Map of Life says in its introduction about current and future generations this 100-Year Life promise – “…the social institutions, norms and policies that await these future centenarians evolved when lives were only half as long and need updating.”
Hence the usefulness of events like the Stanford Longevity Design Challenge, where encouraging the design of “products and services which optimize long life for us all” helps move the needle and engages young students in the longevity conversation. In this 10th Year, the Challenge competition invites designs that “increase the health spans of people in disadvantaged circumstances, which may include poverty, food, housing, or climate insecurity.” Pay heed design teams.
Now clock on and wait for the first Challenge phase when after the open call for presentations in September is then followed by the judging panel will select the finalists by late January 2023.
