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Global Aging, Technology & Innovation
Aging is not for wimps. Think about it. As you change your environment remains the same. Your kitchen cabinets are still the mess they were, but now the height seems like a stretching exercise. Your home's stairs now qualify as a steeple chase. And, what was once a simple shopping trip or bus ride ...
If you are in the housing and real estate development business, an investor or simply thinking about your own housing options the baby boomers are shaping your future fortunes again – but with a twist. Rather than driving new home sales they are showing preliminary signs of staying put. That is ...
Older workers are news these days. Consider two contrasting New York Times stories reported on the same day. Nelson Schwartz writes in Easy Out the Gray-Haired. Or Not., that older workers, regardless of industry, are being shown the door due to “leaner and meaner” business realities and changing ...
Marketers and product developers are showing new interest in older consumers. That interest must include more than simply dusting off brands and banking on fond memories. Many brand strategists hold on tightly to an assumption that comforts them like a warm blanket – focusing brand engagement ...
Aging is new. Lifespans today in the industrialized world are 30-40 years more than they were 100 years ago. Older adults are among the fastest growing cohorts in developing economies. Living longer and better demands that we rethink personal, societal and technical ideas of what it means to age ...
It’s Mother’s Day. Are you thinking about mom? No, not because it’s Mother’s Day, but because mom is a trendsetter a virtual thermometer of what’s hot and what’s not. I am not referring to today’s much-studied chief consumer officer of the home caught between kids, parents, partner, work and so ...
Change is good. It introduces the new and tests the assumptions of the old. I have made a change in the publishing strategy of disruptivedemographics.com. Beginning May 2011 ‘Disruptive Demographics’ will be a featured blog on bigthink.com. DisruptiveDemographics.com will redirect all traffic to ...
The telecommunications industry is stumped by the baby boomers.The first cohort to refuse to let products or services define them as ‘old’,one would think the boomers would be quicker to acquire smart phones, whichpromise prompt responses to work-related emails and apps to followeverything from ...
I was invited by AARP and the Atlantic Monthly to join a forum "What's Next? How Technology will Revolutionize the Boomer Generation" in Washington, DC last Fall. This is update to a previous post Baby Boomers & Technology: Possibilities, Privacy & Promise. Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor of ...
Last week the MIT Center for Real Estate convened the MIT 2011 Real Estate Symposium engagingleaders in real estate finance, design, development and management. JoiningAvalon Bay’s William McLaughlin, AC Nielsen’s Joe Whitley and Reach Advisors’James Chung on the opening plenary panel – The ...
Prognostics is a field within engineering to predict when a system or a component within that system will no longer function as designed or is likely to fail. For example, when is a car transmission likely to need maintenance or malfunction? See here an example of how NASA applies prognostic ...
Face it you like your privacy. But little by little you have given it up for a little benefit here, a convenience there. Your life, home, auto and health insurers know a lot about you -- some things you don't even remember or knew were recorded. Schools and employers have a long paper trail that ...
Technology and aging over the last decade has made it to the public agenda. It has been the subject of government, industry and university researchers in specialized journals for many years. It has been the topic of hearings in capitals around the world. It even makes the papers and evening news ...
Joined by MIT AgeLab's Katie Godfrey, Ihad the pleasure of being on NBC ‘s Today Show this week. NBC’s Peter Alexander visited the AgeLab to take a new look at old age to show viewers whatmight be ‘next’ for life tomorrow – from driving the lab’s next generationAwareCar, to future home services ...
Images matter. They help us make sense of the world anddefine our reality. Overtime images can become symbols that frame what webelieve – thwarting or facilitating change. Changes in social definitions ofhow we view the world often comes with slow, sometimes subtle cues that reframehow we think ...