“Longevity-Ready Environments: Rethinking Physical Spaces for Century-Long Lives”
One element that distinguishes the Stanford Center on Longevity annual Design Challenge is its recognition of international student talent, and this year is no exception with the Design Challenge 21/22 Winner (announced April 6),coming from the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria with a design concept for modified streetlights that help urban passengers without a smart phone to connect to rides from auto rickshaw drivers. Sarewait is called.
So how does this fit with this year’s theme Longevity-Ready Environments? Taking a broad view of what contributes to a longer healthier life, this Design Challenge focused on the built urban environment, the physical spaces we live in. Competing student teams were asked to pick environmental issues from airborne pollutants and household toxins to energy consumption reductions, and present tech design products that would thus support healthier longevity.
In this year’s winners case,Team Sarewa identified how rickshaw drivers were wasting time and fuel looking for riders, contributing to city air pollution. Of course air pollution affects all people at any age, and as the next decade progresses more of the global population will be living in urban areas, which means that longevity patterns for many be increasingly challenged across multi- generational urban communities.
“Making communitiesLongevity-Readyfor everyone” is Stanford’s phrase that really moves us forward in ways that terms like age-friendly, for instance, might only limit our focus on those who are already older adults or so-called seniors. More on that another day, but if you look back even at the 2014/15 Stanford Design Challengetitled“Enabling Personal Mobility Across the Life Span” designer teams were asked to create solutions for empowering mobility among older adults.
How Stanford has evolved the Design Challengesince those early days. By 2018/19 the theme went to “designing for intergenerational impact” and the winner was a project called Family Room a voice-based interface for facilitating intergenerational connection and story capture. Judging by the above web link, looks like it’s still a work in design process.
In the 2020/21 first COVID year, the winner was another student team from Nigeria called Foris Labs that designed an offline platform that simulates a science lab for high school students. Interesting story in the short video link above, but the key thing you need to know is that their idea addresses the issues of inequity to digital access which by the way is also a problem with older adults as well as students in some regions of the world.
As usual every year since 2013/14 when I started following this event I always try to pick my choice for the winning design team and this year my third choice Karpolax from Makerere University in Uganda placed 2nd. This product is a sachet using green nanotechnology to extend the shelf life of fruit. Onward we go, and I look forward to the announcement of the 2022/23 Design Challenge, the 10 Year Anniversary edition. Where will tech design help us next?
