Products For Aging Baby Boomers Trend In Manufacturing Designs Is To Produce Merchandise People Can Use Through Old Age

Every 18 seconds, another baby boomer turns 50. Even though their AARP cards are in the mail, don’t you dare call them “old.”

Half of them are creaky with some form of arthritis. They say it’s no problem - don’t you dare call it a handicap.

Boomers are not the first to slap a happy face on old age. It seems to be the American way.

At least 80 percent of their parents have at least one chronic condition, yet a third of them assess their health as good or excellent, according to the Statistical Handbook on Aging Americans.

This denial is causing economic confusion. Manufacturers are perched on a heap of products and expensive research aimed at the aging population. They are in an advertising quandary. How do you market products to the old without addressing their age?

To be successful, you don’t.

In the early ‘90s, Fiskars, the scissors company, developed spring-loaded scissors specifically for people with arthritis. The design proved beneficial for children and people who had trouble with fine motor skills.

Fiskars’ new product, called Softouch, was billed as easier to use. It was not singled out as a product for old people and clumsy children.

According to American Demographics magazine, Fiskars sold 10 times more Softouch scissors than company officials expected to in the first year.

Emphasizing a product’s ease is the passkey to $25 billion, the amount the 55-plus crowd spends in a year, according to the American Association of Retired Persons.

Some products aimed at the geriatric crowd languish on back shelves. Others are never produced for lack of advertising direction.

“How to market has been the stumbling block all along,” says Ellen Goldsberry, a professor at the University of Arizona. In 1995, she completed a measurement study of 7,000 women older than 55 to establish a pattern size for older women.

Large merchants such as Sears and L.L. Bean helped fund the study that documented an extreme change in a woman’s physiology as she ages - shoulders round forward, causing the pitch of the neck to change. This stance makes backs broader than chests. To add to the indignity, bottoms flatten, tummies pooch and waistlines thicken.

A few small companies are trying to capitalize on the new patterns, but not particularly effectively, Goldsberry says, and large manufacturers are still dithering.

While they decide what to do with Goldsberry’s findings, she’s preparing for more road work. A group of automotive engineers and furniture manufacturers is paying for a study to measure people’s mass. She will use computer scanners and her tape measure to provide a new database for all ages.

The new measurements should be a boon to product designers. The dimensions that set today’s standards were taken in the mid-1940s on armed-forces personnel as they were discharged from service. From this set of figures, all clothing sizes, as well as architectural and product specifications, are based.

The retiring soldiers provided such a small range of age and fitness that their measurements are not adequate for the user-friendly ‘90s.

“People have been getting larger, body shapes change and the auto industry is well aware of this,” says Dick Ruzzin, director of brand design for Chevrolet cars.

He blames the minivan for increasing people’s perception of what constitutes adequate space. Now all cars have to have more space, even the Corvette.

The aging population has not been ignored by car manufacturers, either. While the designers at Chevrolet are blasting out some extra interior room, they’re also enlarging the lettering and knobs on the instrumentation panel.

“We know that when people age, the controls, door handles and seat belts have to be addressed (by designers). With a touch of arthritis, people can’t grasp and turn things as well.

“When they tell us ‘I can’t turn the radio on. Those knobs are too small,’ a lot of work is done as a result.”

Ruzzin says he does not think the design changes will separate the boomers from the Gen-Xers or an even younger audience; they will only separate more customers from their money.

“We see all these things as an opportunity in the marketplace,” Ruzzin says.

“They don’t need to build a car for an older customer, just a comfortable car for anybody, so it is universal across the population,” says Goldsberry.

“Every product that is designed well for a mature market is designed well for the younger market. You can’t make something too easy to use,” says Margaret Wylde, a specialist in the needs of older people and owner of the Oxford, Mississippi-based company ProMatura.

Accessibility, or the concept of universal design, is what is driving much of today’s product design.

A lever door handle, for example, is much easier to use than a doorknob. It doesn’t take an adult-size hand, a firm grip or wrist flexibility. It can be accessed with an elbow or a cane. Children, adults, people with their arms full of grocery bags, or hands gnarled with arthritis can operate a lever with ease.

A lever door handle is an example of universal design, a 22-year-old term coined by product designer Ron Mace.

Next year, more than two decades after its inception, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City will mount a show of products, services and environments that, according to the exhibition proposal, “were conceived to serve the greatest number of people throughout their entire life span.”

Universal design is often lumped with products for the disabled, and although it is true that the disabled benefit from universal design, so do small children, old people and people with limited range of motion, vision or hearing.

All people fall within those parameters sometime in their lives, says Mace.

At the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Mace and a group of architects and designers have redesigned thermostats, vacuum cleaners, gardening equipment, faucets, can openers and microwave ovens to universal design principles.

A more humane thermostat has buttons the size of ones used on large-button telephones. It lights up, “because thermostats always seem to be in dark corners,” Mace says. It speaks, and tells you whether the heat or air conditioning is on and at what setting. The temperature button will audibly and visually count up or down until you release it. And the whole shebang can be operated with a remote control. The thermostat is accessible to healthy adults as well as people with limitations of sight, hearing, motion and hand mobility.

A dishwasher earns the universal design seal of approval (one is actually in the works) when it is installed higher than usual. Raising a dishwasher at least 8 inches, preferably more, makes it accessible for people in wheelchairs. The closer the bottom rack is to the top of the cabinet, the easier and safer it is to unload.

Simple changes - jacked-up appliances, lowered light switches, widened doors and grab bars - can make a house easier to use for multiple generations and abilities.

“A grab bar is a Band-Aid for everybody,” says Wylde. “We’ve got to realize it’s a safety device. I can’t tell you how many older adults will say, ‘I’ll get one when I need one.’ Of course, it’s not until after they’ve broken their hip that they’ll get one.”

Most homes are designed for adults in their prime, not for the course of a lifetime.

As our house becomes hostile, our kitchens unusable and our bathrooms dangerous, “Rather than complain or look for new solutions, we accommodate or retreat,” says Wylde.

“People tend to make do,” agrees Mace. “Older people will give up some life activity because they are limited by bad design. They give up doing things because they are embarrassed.”

“No one wants to be singled out as different and special, so they don’t complain,” Mace says. “This allows manufacturers to put out poorly designed products.”

The design of electronics - black knobs and buttons on black boxes, (VCRs, CD players, televisions, and cable boxes, to name a few) are cited by many design professionals as a case where manufacturers have gotten away with, if not murder, certainly bad planning.

“As customers, we are very design blase. We never complain,” says Wylde.