Design for age, design for all

by | Thursday, August 28, 2008

The NYTimes has a story (For the Advanced in Age, Easy-to-Use Technology) about companies that are creating tools that are “helping those in their 60s maintain their youthful self-images.”

What is interesting is that these technologies are typically not directly aimed at the aging boomer market. As the article says:

The companies that are successfully marketing new technologies to older people are not those that have created high-tech ways for seniors to open jars. Rather, they are the ones that have learned to create products that span generations, providing style and utility to a range of age groups.

They examples the article lists include the Apple’s iPod and the Honda Element.

Consumers with less-nimble fingers find the large knobs in Honda’s boxy Element easy to manipulate. But Honda did not design them for the arthritis stricken, but for young people who drive while wearing ski gloves, said a Honda spokesman, Chris Martin. The Element’s design, aimed at younger people, inadvertently attracted consumers across age groups.

I find this idea of technologies designed for one group becoming attractive to other groups (with differing needs) quite interesting. It reminds me of how assistive technologies enter schools aimed at children with special needs but often get used by others. A good example is text to speech – useful for children with reading problems – being used by the general student, who may prefer listening to information rather than read it directly on screen.

This is part of a general idea that the affordances of technology can be leveraged by different groups for their own purposes – a repurposing of technology as it were. I have argued elsewhere (and infact made this point quite strongly during my recent presentation in India, see here) that it is this repurposing that lets generic technologies become educational technologies. I made a similar point in this posting as well.

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Engineering | India | Teaching | Technology | TPACK | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Explore: To see … or not to see

I have been working with my kids on a series of short videos around the themes of Explore, Create, Share. These three words were used in my video mashup of a commercial (see the commercial AND my mashup here). Original music for this series was created by my cousin,...

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...

Beauty in science

An evocative image from today's NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article: The next time you see the northern lights, you’ll be...

Flip/Flop: Goodbye 2022 – Welcome 2023

Flip/Flop: Goodbye 2022 – Welcome 2023

Since 2008 our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. Our videos are always typographical in nature with some kind of an AHA! moment or optical illusion built in. This year’s video is no different. Check it...

CEP917 wins MSU-ATT Award

CEP917 (Knowledge Media Design) a course I co-taught with Danah Henriksen, in the fall semester 2012, received the First Place (in the Blended Course category) in the 2013 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition. I would be remiss if I didn't mention...

We feel fine about ambient findability (really?)

Most of us live our lives with the assumption of practical obscurity - i.e. the idea that what we do, even in public places, is essentially private. There are just too many people and just too few ways of tracking us individually. So we were for the most part,...

TPACK @ PLP: cool webinars, great resource

Leigh Wolf pointed me to an fantastic resource for teachers and educators interested in learning more about TPACK. These are a series of online interactive webinars titled TPACK Fridays and are organized by the Powerful Learning Practice (plpnetwork.com). What is...

Recreating D-Day…

... on a shoe-string budget. Three designers and a big empty beach, see the results! http://www.youtube.com/v/WRS9cpOMYv0

Plagiarism update, VI

I guess this is the final update on the David Jiles, Ph.D. plagiarism saga. Those of you who came in late can get the complete picture by starting from David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist! The sequence continued as follows: Emailing a plagiarist |...

3 Comments

  1. Ryan F

    I think it’s great that they are developing technologies for a market that isn’t usually targeted.

    Reply
  2. Shawna

    Very interesting insights of companies marketing strategies! Never underestimate your peer group.

    Reply
  3. Mohammad Fletcher

    Interesting reading, thank you!

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *