Designing for the Elderly: Targeting the Wallet of the Voice of Experience 

By Matthew Defosse, Modern Plastics Worldwide 

World

September 1, 2007

Some demographers estimate that half of the girls born since 2000 will live to see the next century. Parts designers are well advised to give a thought to the fastest growing segment of society—the elderly.

By 2020, there will be 53.2 million Americans older than age 65—about 16% of the population—and 6.5 million of those will be over 85, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2005 the total population of Japan dropped for the first time in the post-WWII years, but the percentage of the total population aged 65 or older reached a new high of 25.6 million, exceeding 20% for the first time, reports the Japanese government’s annual report on aging. Academic journal Oxford Today reckons that by 2030 half the population of Western Europe will be over the age of 50, with a predicted average life expectancy of a further 40 years. 

How to design for this burgeoning group of consumers? Well, don’t, at least not specifically, recommends Davin Stowell, CEO of product design firm Smart Design (New York). He says designers should not limit themselves to products specifically marketed to the aged or elderly, except for extreme products. “We’re becoming a more youthful society,” he notes, not in terms of average age but with reference to how people perceive themselves. 

His recommendation: think in terms of ‘universal,’ or better yet, ‘inclusive’ design. Using lighter materials, combining materials with greater contrasts to make products easier to see or for backlighting, and using of soft-touch or other easily handled grips: all are examples of design aspects that appeal to seniors but also offer benefits to most other users, too. “If you design it for everyone, then it’s not stigmatized” as a strictly senior product, he notes. The economics of such inclusive designs also appeal to original equipment manufactures, as not limiting a product enables a processor to manufacture in higher volumes.

One example he cites of inclusive design is door handles, which in the U.S. usually are knobs to be turned, but in Europe are almost always levers. “You don’t think of it as anything special, it’s just better,” he says of the levers, noting that they are easier for children and seniors (and others) to grasp, and also can be easily manipulated even if a person has his hands full. “For the most part, products that work well for the elderly also appeal to others,” he notes. Plus, he notes, what used to be considered traditional for the elderly has changed dramatically. “We’re finding that the tastes of recent retirees is much more similar to that of 30-year olds,” he says.

Still, there are applications where age plays a factor in design, or maybe should. One is medicine/pharmaceutical packaging, since seniors are on average the greatest consumers of these. Medical packaging in the U.S. remains largely bulk packaging, often blow- or injection molded bottles, but there is a trend to shift some of this bulk packaging to more costly blister packaging, as this could improve patient compliance. 

European packaging comes out ahead of that in North America in the pharmaceuticals and medical industry, says Rick Knight, global business manager for healthcare specialty films for Honeywell (Morris Township, NJ), who is also on the board of directors for the Healthcare Compliance Packaging Council, a trade group pushing for regulation to support the switch from bulk packaging to blister packs for medicine. Honeywell markets its Aclar polychlorotrifluoroethylene (PCTFE) films for medical packaging; customers include Alcan, Ineos, and Klockner Pentaplast. 

Aging populations typically require more medical care, but as the responsibility for medical care is shifted onto the shoulders of patients, Knight says packaging needs to help patients take care of themselves. “In the U.S., about 30-60% of all medication is taken incorrectly,” he says, usually either not at the correct frequency or not in the recommended dosage. To date there has been no legal push in the U.S. to switch to blister packaging, but he predicts this will change. “There’s a trend,” he notes, with Wal-Mart switching some of its generic products from bottles to blister packs. Blister packs typically are sealed with a thermoplastic film.

International norms push for inclusive packaging 

Danish packaging company Superfos last year was one of a number of packaging processors, and the first in Europe, to introduce packaging closures/lids meeting UN-approved packaging standard NF EN ISO 8317, which stipulates that packaging closures should be impossible for children under 51 months to open, and easy-to-open for those aged 50-70. The Superfos lids are for large containers that may contain chemicals or other hazardous materials. Smaller is the Pharma SHR child-resistant and senior-friendly blister packaging system for pharmaceuticals, with paperboard producer Stora Enso providing the package design and a special tear-resistant board material, and Bosch Packaging providing the machines to make these.
Whether legally mandated or simply a good choice to appeal to a growing, and comparatively wealthy market segment, Smart Design’s Stowell encourages designers to pay close attention to their choice of materials. One of his firm’s customers, NY-based kitchen and consumer goods manufacturer Oxo Intl., owes much of its success to its early recognition that soft-touch materials made great handles. “Oxo made their business originally on Santoprene,” he says, referring to the thermoplastic elastomers offered by the ExxonMobil subsidiary of the same name. 

One material Stowell sees gathering favor in inclusive design parts design is silicon, which is increasingly specified for products as diverse as medical and kitchen utensils, lids, and bakeware. He says he also has his eye on wood/plastic composites, as these can be shaped in ways that wood cannot, but also offer the aesthetics of wood, which have a widely inclusive appeal.
Quickparts lays out rapid manufacturing’s future.

With a first-hand view of the rapid-manufacturing industry’s rise from additive processes for prototypes to low-volume creation of production parts, Ron Hollis, founder, president, and CEO of Quickparts, is predicting the next new wave in rapid—low-volume layered manufacturing—in a new book he just authored. Quickparts launched in 1999 with an online platform that features “instant quotes” where processors send in a CAD file with a few parameters and instantaneously generate a price quote. 

Hollis, who began his career as a design engineer at Boeing working on the space station, and feeling first hand the frustration of sourcing parts, saying he founded Quickparts on the premise that “for an engineer, it’s very, very difficult to get custom parts.”

Writing the book, entitled “Better Be Running! Tools to Drive Design Success,” with executives versus engineers in mind, Hollis says his goal was to lay out the potential of new additive technologies in a manner that wasn’t “too geeky.” Hollis predicts that over the course of the next five years, what he terms a “paradigm shift” in manufacturing is coming, where advances in additive manufacturing, specifically in materials, could allow a new method of design. Specifically, Hollis expects a shift away from design for manufacturability and assembly, where multiple components are added just to ease downstream processes, to simpler, holistic part concepts. More information on the book is available at www.betterberunning.com.

Hollis says the company’s 50%/yr growth earned it a spot on Inc. 500’s list of fast-growth firms. The company has 8000-plus customers, and last year, Hollis says it took orders for 50,000 custom parts, with individual lot sizes putting the aggregate number of components into the millions. The company has a staff of 75, many of them engineers, but no manufacturing machinery, outsourcing the jobs through a vendor base and acting as project managers. 

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