We don't read much in the popular press about “transgenerational design,” nor hear it discussed very often at cocktail parties. But most people, when introduced to a "transgenerational" product or environment, immediately recognize its benefits.

Still, across the globe the secret is out. Astute manufacturers, researchers, marketers, and design organizations have discovered, and now embrace, the transgenerational design concept.

As global competition intensifies, they recognize the competitive advantage of attracting the attention—and collective buying power—of the world's exploding "silver market" of 506,000,000 aging consumers.

Transgenerational design affords that advantage!

What Are the Benefits?

Quite simply, "transgenerational design" promote graceful aging, softens the impact of the aging process, extends independent living, and enhances the quality of life for all—the young, the old, the able, the disabled. Such products and environments:

• Serve the widest range of ages and abilities
• Bridge the transitions across life's stages
• Respond to the widest range of individual differences and abilities
• Offer a variety of means to accomplish one's activities of daily living
• Maintain one's dignity and sense of self worth
• Enable personal and social interaction
• Support intergenerational relationships

In short, transgenerational designs accommodate rather than discriminate, innovate rather than replicate, and sympathize rather than stigmatize.

What It's NOT

Transgenerational design is NOT about producing products for "the aged," cynical "elderly housing," or homes for "the handicapped."

Such designs provide only the minimum required, code-compliant, adaptive "add-ons"—such as grab bars, ramps, lever faucets and raised toilet seats—which reek with "institutional," "medical," "aging," and "disability connotations.

What It IS

Transgenerational design IS about designing all consumer products and residential environments to be accommodating—and attractive—to the widest possible spectrum of those who would use them—the young, the old, the able, the disabled—without penalty to any group.

It's more than just functional design accommodation based on required professional and governmental standards. It also takes into consideration the users' individuality, aesthetic sensitivity, social stature, and self respect.

What It DOES

Essentially, Transgenerational design neutralizes the effects of age, impairments, or disability by accommodating people of all ages and abilities.

It accomplishes this through innovative, human-sensitive architecture, living spaces, appliances, transportation, household products, fixtures, and communication systems.

Tansgenerational designs emphasise safety, comfort, convenience, beauty, accessibility, clean-ability, adjust-ability, ease of use, and bodily fit—"transgenerational" features that sympathize rather than stigmatize.

Transgenerational designs delivers five essential benefits:

• USABILITY — permits us to easily obtain or use an object, service, or facility and move freely and normally throughout an environmental setting.

• LEGIBILITY— offers cues that enable us to perceive our sense of place and provides messages of information, orientation, direction, and differences.

• ACCESSIBILITY — permits us to easily access and use an object, service, or facility regardless of our age or ability.

• ADAPTABILITY — determines ease of use and range of fit and adjustability offered by a product or environment.

• COMPATABILITY — demands that artifacts and spaces be yielding, tolerant, unassertive, and amenable to our functional limitations.
  
  

• SAFETY — freedom from danger, injury, or damage under reasonable conditions by all who may be expected to handle, use, or operate them. Transgenerational designs anticipate a wide variety of physical and sensory impairments, providing safe, supporting features—even before they may be needed.

• COMFORT — freedom from disturbing, painful, or stigmatizing forms or features. Transgenerational designs provide physical and sensory comfort for those with impairments as well as the able-bodied.

• CONVENIENCE — convenient, handy, and appropriate use for all who would use them—This means convenient use, transport, packaging, storage, operatton, cleaning and repair.

• EASE OF USE  — simple, uncomplicated, and easy to use. Designs should offer readable and understandable instructions and directions, simple operations, and logical controls that do not confound our intelligence. Such designs do not tire our muscles or defy our dexterity—regardless of our age or ability.

• ERGONOMIC FIT  — physical fit and sensory accommodation for the widest possible range of appropriate human dimensions. Ergonomic designs recognize that while our bodily dimensions and abilities reach their full limits during our late teens and early twenties, they also diminish as we age.

• SUITABILITY — appropriate size, function, appearance, adjustability, accommodation, and symbolism suitable for the widest spectrum of anticipated users.
  
• USER VALUE — infusing 'utility' with user-sensitive value-added perceptions, components, and features. User value satisfies consumers' desire by translating expectations into positive reactions, thus maintaining self respect, extending independence, and promoting satisfaction.
  

Applying these principles provides products and environments with a broad 'transgenerational' appeal.

THE LAST QUARTER-CENTURY spotlighted two unresolved environmental discrimination problems—disability and aging.

Each aroused a separate segment of our global conscience and sparked efforts to satisfy the swelling need for accessible housing, products, and environments—attractive to, and usable by, people of all ages and abilities.

Disability

The 1970s and 80s witnessed a nascent effort to provide accessibility and societal inclusion for people with disabilities. Attracted by a common cause, and joined by the concept of accessibility, disabled people united behind a disability rights movement to achieve equality for those denied independence, autonomy and full access to society.

Their collective voices, fueled a societal demand for environmental accessibility, which coalesced and embraced the term, “universal design,” advanced in the mid 1980s by Ronald L. Mace, FAIA, a disabled architect from North Carolina State University.

As the movement grew, its dedicated efforts propelled passage of the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act, and in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which "prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in places of public accommodation."

Both Acts led to a welcomed societal inclusion for people with disabilities. But its mandated governmental regulations, codes, standards and policies for reshaping a broad spectrum of physical environments, impacted the building industry and architectural profession.

Problems

The Acts' well intentioned access provisions produced unintentional results. To solve conflicting priorities and problems, isolated pockets of academic, governmental, and private centers of influence began developing alternative strategies and solutions for reaching their common goal of 'universal' accessibility.

Their combined efforts and inflluence sparked a new professional awareness within the design community of the need for a fresh new generation of products and environments that accommomdate all ages and abilities—including people with impairments and disabilities.

As early as the start of the1880s, ripples of concerned awareness about population aging had begun to form.

Not only were older people increasing in number, they were also living longer—a prediction that a future rise in physical and sensory impairments and disabilities was inevitable; and a recognition that the design professions were facing a new challenge.

With the dawn of the new millenium, and for the first time in our planet’s history, the world contained more people aged 65 and older than the combined populations of Australia, Russia, Japan, France, and Germany.

The concept and term, "Transgenerational Design," emerged from this growing recognition and concern, coined in the mid-1980s by Syracuse University industrial design professor James J. Pirkl, FIDSA.

Two seminal 1988 publications resulted from his design-for-aging research project with gerontologist Anna L. Babic under a grant from the Administrative Office of Human Development Services, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC:

1. Guidelines and Strategies for Designing Transgenerational Products: A Resource Manual for Industrial Design Professionals, and
   
   
2. Guidelines and Strategies for Designing Transgenerational Products: An Instructor's Manual, distributed to all U.S. industrial design schools and programs accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD).

In addition to providing specialized information about the realities of human aging, each manual contained a detailed set of design guidelines and strategies for accommodating limitations and changing abilities in vision, hearing, touch, and mobility—which lead to impairments and disabilities affecting people of all ages and abilities.

Consolidation

Against this backdrop, Pirkl's third book, Transgenerational Design: Products for an Aging Population, published in 1994, articulated the emerging need for designing consumer products that accommodated people across the spectrum of age and ability.

The transgenerational concept contrasted sharply with universal design's founding focus on achieving architectural and environmental accessibility through mandated standards.

In contrast, Pirkl's book promoted a new 'transgenerational' message: "make products and environments compatible with those physical and sensory impairments associated with human aging and which limit major activities of daily living." It had a profound effect.

Since the book’s publication, numerous presentations, seminars, articles, and media exposure of the Transgenerational Design concept have attracted international attention and adoption.

Moreover, because its neutral and non-stigmatizing label bridges all ages and abilities, an increasing number of astute global manufacturers and research organizations embrace the ‘transgenerational’ design concept, recognizing its competitive advantage for attracting the attention—and collective buying power—of the exploding aging market.

Conjecture

AS WE ENTER THE NEW MILLENNIUM, one can only speculate the impact that transgenerational design will impart to tomorrow's products and environments.

The answer, of course, will come from tomorrow's designers—how well will they unite the forms of function and beauty with human needs and sensitivity—the essense of true professional design service and responsibility.