At the San Francisco offices of the global design firm IDEO, overlooking the blue expanse of San Francisco Bay, 150 people spend each workday bettering how we live by re-thinking everyday tangibles like IKEA kitchens, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, and, years ago, Crest toothpaste tubes. More recently, though, IDEO has started to think more widely about how we might engineer large cultural shifts in areas that aren’t traditionally thought of as “designable”—how we approach topics like religion, aging, and even death. One recent Wednesday morning, a small huddle of people that included industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and roboticists stood at a long, narrow conference table to present a series of prototypes to designer Barbara Beskind. They wanted her feedback on how to make a robot more accessible to those with vision and hearing impairment. As Beskind carefully examined the models, intended for use in health care, the other designers hovered, watching her for signs of approval.
“Are these meant to be eyes? Do they light up?” Beskind asked, not unkindly. She smoothed her black pants, shifting forward in her chair to get a better look at the robots through yellow-tinted glasses. She wanted to know if they would talk, and if they’d have a female voice, which she thought would be friendlier than a male one. She worried that the robot’s toy-like appearance, with its big, blinking eyes, might be infantilizing to patients. She asked one designer if the device could be connected to existing medical systems—“Can your doctor send medications to the robot? Could it be paid for by Medicare, so that more people could use it?” Her questions were focused and came at a brisk pace. I watched the other designers watch her, fully invested in her reactions.
[For more of this story, written by Bonnie Tsui, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an.../the-aging-advantage]
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