New for old

Published 17 May 1999

Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams

If they have control over the matter, designers try to grow old gracefully. When Patricia Moore went to work for Raymond Loewy in New York some 20 years ago, the great man was 82 and fresh from work on the Nasa space shuttle. She found him "trying to disguise the fact that his body was failing him, beginning to understand the failure of design".

One of the few women at Loewy's company, Moore decided to look in more detail at how the world treats older people. For more than three years, the twenty-something designer made up and dressed up as a woman of 60 years older. She wore opaqued contact lenses. She taped her joints to simulate the effects of arthritis. Her mother helped with the make-up; the first time it was done, they both cried: Moore looked so like her grandmother. Moore went into the city. "I still had two eyes and a big mouth, but none of them seemed to work properly. Cabbies wouldn't stop, knowing I would take too long to get in and I might tip badly." Eventually she was picked up by a taxi driver who considerately shouted his badinage. She remembered she should have plugged her ears, too.

One day, she flew to a conference on building for ageing populations. The stewardess spilt hot coffee on her and was scarcely bothered. Nobody spoke to her at the conference. In short, Moore found that the world and the design profession sees two groups - normal people, and people in the way. "I was thrilled. It was ageism. And it was happening to me. They were architects, they knew best. I was one of them."

Moore had "some of the best and worst moments of my life". She was beaten up by a gang of boys and left in a pool of blood. She went to funerals. She began to understand why people of a certain age sometimes don't want to make friends. "In character," Moore recently told an audience at the Royal Society of Arts, "I was given the great gift of seeing what tomorrow might bring in time to see that it doesn't happen. I heard the truth about what people really did to 'help' their ageing parents."

Moore's experience, recounted in a book, helped to launch the idea of "universal design". But this ideal remains far from central to many designers' thinking.

"Twenty years on, we still don't seem to grasp the sanity of inclusion," according to Moore. Designers like to think they are more sympathetic, more practically helpful than most. But in a profession that Jeremy Myerson, director of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in London, says is "relentlessly ageist, where it's hard to keep your position at 40", progress is fitful at best. In this, the UN International Year of Older Persons, judges of the RSA Student Design Awards, the largest such national scheme, found little to praise in their awards category of "New design for old".

Worse, we still live in a climate where Barnack's, a Peterborough confectionery company, thinks it's a bright idea to release a product called "Jellyatrics". Perhaps older people should have equality of opportunity when it comes to being cast into sugared jelly. Perhaps it is no worse biting the heads off oldies than off jelly babies. The pretext is that jelly babies, invented at the end of the first world war, have grown up. There are five characters in the different colours of the sweets. One's called Frau Zimmer. Others carry sticks or huddle around their knitting. The postmodern irony is complete when you learn that, having initially objected to the stereotypes portrayed, Age Concern is being enticed into endorsing the sweets with its logo in exchange for a cut of the profits. As I'm wondering whether I dare ask the inventor if he might venture an ethnic range, he tells me that the black one will indeed be "the first ever Afro-Caribbean" jelly confection.

The Hamlyn Centre aims to make the case for universal design by looking not at "special needs" and products to satisfy them, but at broader social issues. By looking, for example, at changing patterns of life and work, it should be possible to embrace the needs of all without focusing on stigmatised groups. Take transport. One could design a vehicle for older people; strangely, existing four-wheel-drive cars come close to meeting many of the physical requirements of older users. But since advertising has positioned them to appeal to a quite different market, it may be too late to alter people's prejudices. Equally, the answer may be other forms of transport coming from unaccustomed transport service providers.

The centre's merit is that it is not just a think-tank. It plans to work with the college's vehicle design department so that possible solutions are given persuasive visual form in a summer show at which Europe's leading motor industry executives are expected to be present. This may be part of a new tide of altruism. Next week sees the launch of two further initiatives to make the world a better place. The Design Museum will announce a new award for sustainable design. It is a hopeful sign of the times that it is not actually termed sustainable, or green, or eco- anything. It is instead the "Design Sense Award".

The aim is to ignore products with hearts on sleeves that were a feature of the 1980s wave of eco-design, items such as can-crushers made out of copious quantities of plastic that entirely missed the point. It's in the nature of designers to make things. They can't help it that their instinct is to add to the world's sum total of material objects, not subtract from it. With luck the first winners will be ordinary products, but with exceptional stories - they will be checked out by a team of expert inquisitors - of their benign provenance and environmental impact. There will be £40,000 in prize money to be divided between product and architecture categories, and a non-cash prize, a sort of environmental charter mark, for the company judged to be doing most for sustainability.

More surprising is the move by the trade organisation representing the design industry to launch its own charity, Design for Good. The aim is to distribute funds to enable other charities to employ designers and so make their communication more effective. Of course, nothing stops designers doing pro bono work off their own bat; many do. The barrier is more that charities don't naturally think to approach designers. Expect more stylish invitations to give to start coming through your letter box.

RSA Student Design Awards are on show at the Oxo Tower Gallery, London SE1 until 27 May

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