The Fast-Forward Story of Aging

Posted by Allan Tear on July 7, 2008

How do you tell a story of the future through the characters of today? That was the question as the team for the nursing home of the future initiative of BIF converged to begin their work. Designers, technologists, clinicians, ethnographers, photographers and filmmakers, we had been brought together to explore the role of the nursing home in 2020, when the leading edge of the baby boomers enter their elder years and may need assistance with their health routines or daily life.

No doubt there is major change coming for elder care - just look at the demographics. In the US, our population of 80+ year olds is set to triple. As we move from the Radio Generation that occupies nursing homes today to the TV Generation that will stress its capabilities in the near future, we know that attitudes and expectations will change. Some things like health states and life expectancy may move unpredictably - will boomers spend 10+ years in an assisted living or skilled nursing facility once they enter, or will new technologies and medical treatments enable them to live longer at home, only requiring a skilled nursing environment when they are in their late 90's?

A many layered challenge requires many perspectives to unfold and explore it. A physicist-turned-industrial designer who designs space suits for astronauts. A nationally recognized gerontologist who found a way for nursing home residents to get back on bicycles for the first time in 50 years.The Deniro-of-designers, who becomes the user he must design for - paramedic, ski rescue patrol, disaster response. A newspaper photojournalist who spends months at a time with her subjects to tell deep stories through a few well chosen photos. This is a sample of our ten-person team that draws from private industry, health care non-profits, and universities.

We are lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend time with the elders at Tockwotton Home, which is simultaneously one of the ten oldest nursing homes in the country and one of the most forward thinking in Rhode Island. This week we introduced the Nursing Home of the Future initiative to the assisted living residents, in a round robin Q&A that showed us that these folks had plenty of thoughts and opinions to bring to the table. The group of a dozen elders started by testing us - what did they get out of participating, why should they open up their world and their stories to us, who would be our audience for the outcomes, and what did difference did we think it would all make? 

Once we passed that test, the personalities started to emerge. I sat next to a potter who once taught at the Museum of Modern Art in NY. We were peppered by questions from a journalist who traveled with JFK. An actress told us how she was arranging a play with a director from the local arts community and the Tockwotton Home's residents. 

Which brings me back to the question, how do we use the stories of these elders, from a previous generation living in today's nursing home, to explore the needs and experience of a future generation that will require care in the home of tomorrow?

There are some common threads: the physiological reality of aging, the physical, psycho-social and spiritual needs of the elder, the invested infrastructure of facility and systems, the primacy of human contact, and the importance of the elder-family-caregiver triad. These things we understand through the stories of today, and their relevance is timeless. There will also be some big shifts over the next ten years: enabling and assisting technologies, generational attitudes, health conditions, life expectancies, workforce makeup, regional distribution of elders, and regulation and legislation. These we explore through research, bringing together visionary thinkers, and practitioners in other environments that have already encountered how demographic and attitudinal shifts are remaking their markets.

Our goal is to bring these two threads together in a story that brings understanding and a-ha moments to both experts and outsiders, and provides a "welcome mat" to future partners who want to co-develop and test new solutions. We'll be posting weekly blog updates, along with photos and video from this first phase - come follow along!