Warning: Do not “other” me because of my age

 I am not a member of the new and potentially market called “AgeTech” and no longer a member of the larger market segment, “human being.” I need more than just remote patient monitoring, but most product designers have no freaking idea what I need.

This past week was the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I haven’t been for the past four years, but I used to go every year since the year I worked a booth at Comdex on behalf of Intel (1997). Comdex was a tech show that was meant for computer dealers, but the advent of the personal computer so blurred the lines between business and personal use of technology that by 2005 it was replaced by the gigantic CES.

As technology has become more and more relevant in our lives, CES has morphed from a dealer-based wholesale show to a more general tech extravaganza. From year to year we have been able to see first passes of gaming platforms, cellphones, racing cars, huge-ass color TVs, connected kitchen appliances, electric cars, autonomous vehicles, robots, headphones, and remote patient monitors.

 I used to fly up from Phoenix, sprint through the pavilions from one end to the other, and pour myself back on the plane. 

This year’s exhibitors include sports tech and space tech, two categories I haven’t seen at CES before, (Of course I stopped going in 2019) as well as lots of Metaverse and Web3.

And a featured new category: AgeTech. 

Even for the 3200 tech press people signed up to attend, of which I was always one, CES was impossible to comprehend in its entirety. While the keynotes used to be from Intel and Microsoft, they are now from companies like John Deere and BMW.

But guess who also has a space: AARP. And that’s because AARP knows it will have to learn about the technologies available to the elderly if it is going to continue to be relevant. So

AARP has decided it will lead, and it has an accelerator and an AgeTech Collaborative. After decades of ignoring us, advertisers and exhibitors and venture capitalists have discovered the elderly. That’s because the size of the Boomer generation makes it impossible to ignore.

But I hate this new attention lavished on aging. Why? Because it “others” me. It puts me in a separate category from the rest of the world, and that is not how I think, feel, act, or want to be seen. All of a sudden I am not smart, pretty, successful, talented, or part of the family. I am “old.” I am somebody’s responsibility. I have to be told when to stop driving, and my checkbook can be taken away. I am a candidate for Senior Living (banishment to a place full of other old people).

While I know I will not be sprinting from one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center again any time soon, I haven’t gotten any less interested in tech, or any less anxious to try out new things. But when the new things I am asked to try and review include robots designed to replace live dogs and desktop adornments that come alive every now and then to ask me if I want to play “Name the Flags” or whether I have taken my meds, I want to throw them across the room.

I feel like elderly people should be the designers of all of the products that are now designed for them  by youngsters who have never spent five minutes with their grandparents.

Because here’s what you discover about growing older: it happens very slowly, and it happens to different people in different ways and affects different parts of the body and mind. My experience of growing older is not the same experience as my friend Dan’s, because he had an aortic dissection that almost cost him his life and kept him in bed for the better part of a year. I was lucky enough not to have one. Nor is it the same as my friend Roz, who does not suffer from back pain as I do.

We are, therefore, not a “market” but a population of individuals whose earlier experiences and life choices have landed us all in different places at approximately the same time. Some of us need walkers and some do not. Some need hearing aids and some do not. 

So product designers, please slice the market a different way that doesn’t other us and cut us off. Do make products that improve hearing, improve medication adherence, or help people stay mobile. Just don’t label them as “for the elderly,” or “AgeTech.”
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