Design Theory

Baby Boomers and the Psychology of Design

“Eager to make up for time lost daydreaming in foxholes, soldiers arriving home from World War II rushed to their bedrooms with the wives and lovers who had patiently awaited their return. The result was a surfeit of bouncing babies, now known as the boomers, whose numbers are astounding. By 2030, the amount of Americans over the age of 65 will more than double – from just over 30 million to 70 million – and represent more than 20 percent of the population.”

Dwell, April 2006

The Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964: a large generation made larger by the fact that they are living longer than any previous generation. But who, exactly, are these baby Boomers? Children of the “greatest generation”; the generation that fought in World War Two, they are undeniably Americans. They wield mighty purchasing power. Until very recently, they appeared to have a vice-like grip on our politics, businesses and entertainment. And can we conceive of them as anything other than Caucasian?

These photos, which accompanied the Dwell article, are from the 1980s, and by Larry Sultan, from his decade-long project, Pictures from Home. Which is to say that they are not photos of Baby Boomers; they are photos by a Baby Boomer of the “greatest generation”. Why does this matter?

By using these photos to illustrate this article, the editors of Dwell are making an implicit comparison between the Boomers and their parents. This comparison suggests that the Boomers and their parents will age in similar ways; feel similar aches and pains, experience similar illnesses, similar needs, similar desires, as if aging were a universal phenomenon. But is it?

While our bodies may be similar to those of our parents, the physical gestures – the habits of movement – and the diseases that wear those bodies down are not at all the same. Nor do we necessarily share the design solutions that correct these gestures even as they develop. Ergonomic keyboards, for example, are a specific response to a malady which was non-existent in the early or mid 20th century. What this means, of course, is that design implies a subject —a user. Designers design for that user by creating things like ergonomic keyboards. But they also in a very real way design that user. For good or ill, design shapes the body, and not all bodies are alike, nor are all users the same. Even the same user shifts and changes from moment to moment.

The question here is, then, who is the subject of design? If it is the Baby Boomers, as in the Dwell article, then why refer, however obliquely, to their parents? With this sort of confusion, how are designers, who in this case are called to rethink senior housing, to determine who this subject is? And in regard to the Boomer generation, we can see a series of other questions for designers to consider: What are the implications of crafting distinctions between the aging and others? Is there a distinction between the aging and the elderly? Are there political ramifications in our distinctions? Should the point of interest for designers be motivated by the “demographic” with the most “spending power?” And if so, what might this mean for designers as the “me generation” advances in age? What if financial considerations shift? Is there another reason to be focusing on this group? How might we contribute to the growing need in an increasing segment of the population without relying on notions of universality?

MASS PRODUCTION : INDIVIDUALITY

The problem here is the problem of mass production. Because design objects are mass produced objects, they cannot be tailored to individual users. People are different but mass produced objects are not.

This is not to say that the market cannot strive to provide consumers with choices, even with a seemingly vast array of choices. The most recent revolution in design has been a revolution in choice. New means of research and development, new means of production, new means of transportation, have inaugurated a new era of choice in the realm of consumer goods.

Here I am interested in a shift in our cultural understanding of the word “design”. Today the word design evokes the notion of designer products. Designer products may be mass produced but the term designer implies that they are unique in some way, special; it implies that a designer took the time to make the object in just this way. And designers, some designers, have ascended to the rank of celebrities not only with in the field but in culture in general. The maker as culture hero.

Though all products are designed, buying a designer product is buying a unique object, or at least the next best thing, or so it seems. The design revolution of our time has been a revolution in uniqueness: mass production has become niche production. But this is a paradox: Mass produced unique objects appeal to a niche in the market rather than to the market as a whole. The unique object is unique only in a consumer’s fantasy.

Of course, in the era of niche marketing, design is obviously no more monolithic than “culture” is. The drama of the marketplace is a drama of identification, wherein selecting a product is selecting an identity, or at least part of one. Saying, in effect, this is me. Beyond the relative functionality of any given object, the design of that object is the mark of its uniqueness; and its uniqueness constitutes its ability to attract – through identification – a specific me. Simply put, the production of products (and of representations of those products, of graphic design) is the production of lifestyles and of the individuals that lead them. Buying is always in some way buying me.

That the market offers me only a shallow corporate image of myself – a self-image in the society of the spectacle – is true enough, but it is a secondary concern here today. Mass cultural objects are always put to an “independent” use by independent consumers. Brands do project themselves as totalizing realms of fantasy (brands are ideas), but we do not live with products, objects, in that way.

One paradox of cultural production is the paradox that culture is always mass produced – its bigger than any one individual – but that individuals use cultural products as a means to assert individuality. Selling means selling individuality.

But what happens when the individual in question, the subject of design, has no inclination to identify with themselves? When the aging don’t and won’t identify themselves as aging, for example, how can the designer design for the aging?

Jean Améry, in On Aging puts it flatly: “We find it in good order if our neighbor ages and dies, but we always remove ourselves from the course of life and death”

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DESIGN AND THE DENIAL OF DEATH

“The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”
G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic

“Repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“If death gives life individuality and if man is the organism which represses death, then man is the organism which represses his own individuality.”
N.O. Brown, Life Against Death

According to Hegel, individuality is defined by its death. It is a necessary condition of our existence, the negation that is death is the “not” that defines our “am” in the phrases “I am” or “I am not”. Capable of apprehending our finitude, our comprehension of death is something unique to our species—and human beings are left in a troubling situation. Ernest Becker argues that the cognitive dissonance created by our apprehension of and anxiety about death – specifically our own– serves as the engine motivating our actions as we build and support systems that affirm the “significance of human life”.

Death, naturally, calls that significance into question and our socials construct allow us to believe – symbolically – in our own significance by repressing our anxiety. Cultural institutions are the side effect of this denial of death – this repression – this striving for meaning. The makers of the film “The label these as “death denying ideologies” – and these ideologies, when meeting other death-denying ideologies, must protect themselves in order to bolster the symbol structures created to lend meaning and significance to our finite existences.

We are the only animals that deny their own deaths through this repression; by denying our death, we necessarily deny our individuality. Life must be against death; it is defined by and recognizes it as the one event that shapes our individuality. As Jean Amery notes: in denying their pain and failing to recognize something that is their own, they never succeed in discovering themselves.

No-one can die for us, our death is the one thing that is ours alone. To deny it is to deny our singularity. The primary means of this denial is the production of extra-individual ideas and artifacts, which is to say, culture. Design participates as one of the outcomes of that production. Universal design is a paradigm case. It provides entirely extra-individual design solutions and thereby denies the individual totally.

But, interestingly, design walks the line between mass production and the production of the individual by offering the subject an opportunity to define his/herself through mass-produced, but niche-marketed cultural artifacts. It’s Becker’s paradox: formulation of culture as the outcome of our death anxiety which nevertheless offers individuals – partially – a way for them to be themselves. It is in this paradox, also expressed by design that our collective repression of death produces objects and services. Mass produced objects, as we’ve noted before, deny death but are, simultaneously a field for individuality and individual experience. On this point, Michel De Certeau notes that this relationship of the individual with the totalizing force of the mass-production of culture results in a micropolitics of resistance as individuals assert their subjectivity through a series of tactics meant to make the mass-produced their own. Individuality will be asserted, even in the face of the comforts of our death-denying social constructs.

HAVING IT BOTH WAYS

As much as we desire to deny death, deny it’s inevitability, it’s role as the border of life,and so, according to Brown, then deny our individuality, we, nevertheless, find that we cannot and indeed do not simply deny death through repression and give up our subjectivity. Instead, we can see the tension between the urge to deny death and the urge to reaffirm our individuality – and here I mean our “subjectivity.” Baudrillard, in his essay “Death Trick” observes this phenomena.

In fact, the driver of the Porsche will no longer die in this new machine, because he is already dead. Mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, his safety features, tied up in the myth of safety, he is no more than a miniscule and traditional corpse, metallic and mechanical.… He is riveted to his machine, pinned to it. This is the secret of safety, like a steak under cellophane: bury yourself in a sarcophagus to prevent your death. (Here it should be noted the relationship between the culinary technique known as “sous vide” – or cryovacking – a technique invented in slaughterhouses to vacuum-pack freshly cut meat – and freshness. The food is effectively put into “stasis”, having been removed from the relentless march toward decay and rot. But then again, it should be noted, the food is no longer “alive” either.) This is about repression, the worst repression. It consists in dispossessing you of your own death, even the death that dreams, in the depths of one’s instinct for self-preservation, of driving the Porsche. Everywhere, in all its forms, safety is about social control, and the “forces of safety” move from life insurance and social security to seatbelts by way of the police – “Buckle up!”, an advertisement for safety belts. It isn’t so much the convertibility of death into capitalist profit that is at stake but the necessity of dispossessing each of us of the final possibility of killing ourselves, that last “beautiful escape” from a life surrounded by the system.

Here we see culture (ie, the side effect of our repression of death) stepping in to “preserve” our subjectivity, our individuality, by eliding our fragility and therefore the possibility of our own death. We can understand this means that we then no longer truly “live.” Naturally, I am not suggesting that living recklessly is truly living, but instead as Jean Amery says, “Alienation from oneself becomes alienation from being, no matter how faithfully we still attend to the day, fill out our tax declaration, go to the dentist. Were we saying that in aging the world becomes our denial? We could just as easily have said that we are already about to be the negation of our self. Day and night cancel each other out in twilight. ”

For a death-denying culture, decay and all forms of material entropy are to be hidden. Our march toward bodily disintegration results in the blossoming of methods of preservation and conservation of the self – at the expense of living. The recent cultural explosion of the injectable Botox serves to illustrate the point. Botox – a poison more commonly known as botulinum toxin A – operates under the same principles as botulism, a well-known form of food poisoning to which it is related. In short, Botox enacts a short term paralysis of the muscles into which it is injected, preventing them from forming unsightly wrinkles. The poison serves as a preservative. A localized pre-mortem rigormortis (botulism can be fatal is it paralyzes chest muscles) that freezes the user’s muscles, hiding the ongoing cellular decay from sight. Dorian Gray’s relationship to his charmed portrait can be enacted across the country, with millions of Dorian’s defying the truth of their aging bodies and evading the telltale marks of life across their aging visages. But, like Dorian, they cannot evade the truth forever. Their embalmed face must, ultimately, confront the ongoing decomposition of their living bodies. Life will not have marked them, but, sadly, death will not forget them, either. Preservation will not prevent the ultimate decay. Geoffry Zilboorg in Becker’s book states: the very term “self-preservation” implies an effort against some force of disintegration, the affective aspect of this fear, fear of death.”

To think of this tension another way, let’s look at the January 22, 2007 New York Times magazine, that included a short article by Mary Tannen, snappily entitled, “For Mature Audiences.” The piece enthusiastically heralded a shift in imagery used by cosmetics powerhouses from the typically flawless face of a 20-year old starlet or model to older women – women who possessed faces with “staying power.” The reason for this shift, notes Tannen, is the Baby Boomer generation. “They want role models of their own generation,” says one marketing executive. Christian Dior chose the unlined countenance of the 47-year old Sharon Stone ( herself a Botox supporter) as the face for Christian Dior’s new flagship anti-aging product Captive Totale (the translation of which is “Total Prisoner’) (and a choice that included “no discussion of age” according to Dior execs) , a face intended to appeal unabashedly to the Boomers. “Not surprisingly, the me generation likes to look at faces that look like them,” observes Tannen wryly.

But should Dior, MAC and Miu Miu all pat themselves on the back for turning a blind eye toward the usually problematic question of age (and overt hostility toward aging) typically exhibited by the fashion houses? Tannen’s piece notes that almost half of the company’s total treatment business is generated by anti-aging products, and that 65 percent of women purchasing these products are over 40. “What’s more, expenditures of that mature age group are growing at 20% a year” says a Miu Miu spokesman. The New York Times applauds the industry for hiring women from the over 40-set, but how are they portrayed?

So, what is the real message here? The niche market being targeted here understands Sharon Stone is older than your average ingenue. But look at her face. Nary a crevice in sight. The message is unequivocal and disturbing. We’ll let you get older. But “preserve” your youth. It’s an oversight on the part of the New York Times, but the contradictions are so obvious, one wonders how Tannen made it through the piece without offering up some sort of commentary on it. These ads suggest 50 is the new 35. At this rate, death might, in fact, be put off forever. But biology, unfortunately, can’t wait.

DESIGNING FOR BABY BOOMERS

So, what does this all mean for designers who are facing the avalanche of Baby Boomers? What opportunities and options are available to us as we think about who they are, what they might want, what they might need and how, ultimately, it intersects with our own values and goals. Perhaps, most importantly, how might we seize or attract their interest? And why do we want to in the first place?

Perhaps the most obvious challenge is this: How does a designer design for someone who has no inclination to identify with themselves? When the aging don’t and won’t identify themselves as aging, for example, how can the designer design for the aging? Who, then are we designing for?

To return to the Dwell magazine article: “It’s no surprise that in our youth-obsessed society no one wants to admit to getting old. And with all of the options available to promote the goal of looking and feeling younger, most Boomers are enjoying healtihier and longer lives than previous generations. ‘My clients are active people; the eat and exercise well. But their strongest issue is still their fear of facing the future, and many have face-lifts, tummy tucks, and implants.’”

Baby Boomers are “aging” but they exhibit, outwardly, none of the traits of the aged. They are us and not us. They are their own age but, obviously, not. The Dwell article too displays this tension with images of the “Baby Boomers” of the future based on the “greatest generation” of the past. That structurally coincides with the problem itself: people cannot identify with themselves, just as the ads do not coincide with their own referent. It’s not exactly a denial of death. It’s death’s displacement.

These strategies – structurally similar but opposed in the case of Dwell and Dior – are purely negative approaches to the reality of aging and mortality. It cashes in on the universal anxiety about our own finitude. It’s not just death-denying ads that are the problem…there are death-denying products too. Viagra fits the bill, as does Baudrillard’s safe Porsche.

There is another opportunity for designers here. What is at stake for designers and consumers is a more truthful and holistic way of living. A way of living that acknowledges and incorporates the recognition of death; Becker’s “worm at the core of human happiness”; such that we can understand who we are as human beings, to understand ourselves. Aeschylus formulates this as suffering into truth. The truth of our humanity is a truth of self-loss. This means that aging and death are not hidden from view: we do not embalm our living in order to hide our deaths. Joan Didion, in her precise and heartbreakingly sad memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” puts it this way, “One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Emily Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. Death was up close, at home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath.”

An example of this sort of recognition might be seen in the Glacier Circle housing development featured in the New York Times. Designed by and for a group of 12 friends – average age 80, the development imagines and realizes a different approach to “non-institutional aging.” One member said, “We’ve all lived through the Depression and war and the big stuff, so we know that things don’t always stay the same. All of us are interested in living.”

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The question of an aging population – a population that has the money and inclination to pay for the cultural artifacts that will further deny mortality – begs the question about more holistic approaches to design and its methods of identifying its subject. And it begs questions of community and the needs of all people, around the world.

Design problems are always specific problems, yet the design solution must consider the total system in which it is embedded. This in mind, the question of designing for the aging seems rather too specific in comparison to the broader questions of global sustainability, and we need to think about the potentially disastrous effects of prioritizing one constituency, with resources and power, over others, or, for that matter, the rest of us.

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© 2009 k. kanan design news and commentary.