I was interviewed as an expert voice for Deeply Designed, a Substack run by Allison Fonder, for a piece on why design hasn't caught up to the realities of an aging population.
Allison and I first connected years earlier when I served as a juror for the Core77 Design Awards, which she produced at the time. She reached out again after learning I had been working in the designing for aging space, wanting quotes to support a piece she was writing on the disconnect between the scale of global aging (by 2050, 21% of the population in countries responsible for 63% of world GDP will be 65+) and the lack of real cultural or design conversation around it, especially given that people over 55 hold 70% of US wealth. (I digress...)
I shared my perspective on why so much of design for older adults has historically been stripped of personality and built around a narrow, deficit-based view of aging rather than a genuine understanding of who older people actually are. Celebrating individuality as we should across any demographic or measure. One of my points made it directly into the piece: that the industry has long operated on the assumption that older adults can't help themselves without a designer's intervention, which is exactly the bias that produces joyless, purely functional products like guardrails and tennis-ball-footed walkers instead of things people would actually want to use. Everything using Velcro and being the color 'greyge' (gray + beige).
The piece, titled "Why Are We Still Subscribing to the Old Rules of Designing for Aging?", published on October 27, 2026, and features my commentary as the founder of AGE OF_, alongside insights from the designers behind Remsen (Hi Spencer!). Allison reached out to me specifically because of that work, which was a nice moment of recognition for the last decade I have spent studying this space.
