When Kathleen Casey-Kirschling applied for Social Security benefits earlier this month, the whole world was watching. As the first U.S. baby boomer to rise to the occasion — Casey-Kirschling turns 62 on Jan. 1 — she'll get a check from Social Security in February and, some analysts worry, usher in a long fiscal crisis not only for Social Security but for the economy at large.
But where some see imminent catastrophe, author and entrepreneur Mary Furlong sees dollar signs. Boomers aren't going to take retirement sitting down, says Furlong, who has written several books, including Turning Silver to Gold: How to Profit in the New Boomer Marketplace. While retirement may translate into some boomers leaving their current jobs, it won't spell the end of an active life. After all, boomers are the wealthiest, healthiest and best-educated generation in history. "They have hungry minds," she says. "And they've got this bonus round of 30 years."
Furlong is among the more than 20 CEOs, design experts, professors, authors and practitioners from a broad variety of industries speaking at next week's second annual Sarasota International Design Summit at the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota. Why is a boomer-economics guru a featured speaker at a design summit? Because the conferees aren't coming just to talk about building better mousetraps and snazzier graphics. They're here to discuss the biggest design problem of all: the way we live.
That's where Furlong comes in. With 91 percent of the net assets in the U.S. in the hands of the 40-plus market, Furlong says, retiring boomers are positioned to become powerful supporters of a market of specialized products and services. They're looking for "anything that keeps you in the game longer," Furlong says, whether it's a designer hearing aid or urban "retirement" communities situated close to colleges and universities. Opportunities to tap into this market will be especially rich in Sarasota and Tampa Bay, an area Portland economist Joe Cortright predicts will be a magnet for retiring boomers in the coming years.
So boomer retirement is a natural for discussion at the summit. So are presentations and breakout panels covering the design of everything from health care to the entertainment industry, from international business strategies to environmental sustainability. The diverse roster of speakers even includes a chef — Chicago's Homaro Cantu — who has redesigned cuisine by "printing" food with edible ink and paper.
"People think about art and design in certain ways, and it is an incredible misconception," says Dr. Larry Thompson, president of Ringling College of Art and Design, which hosts the event. "Design is not just about a product, an interior space, a great logo. It is much, much broader than that. … Designers are solving the world's most important problems."
Much of this year's summit focuses on service design, a discipline relatively new to the United States. Shelley Evenson, a professor who teaches the subject at Carnegie Mellon's School of Design in Pittsburgh, explains that while the visual charms of design are indeed seductive, they hardly tell the whole story of design's importance to business. Pointing to icons like the iPod or the Starbucks logo, she describes the extensive net of services that surround and bolster them, from iTunes' ease of use to the nattily efficient Starbucks barista.
And she's applied the theory in the classroom. Earlier this year, Evenson and her students set out to change the way cancer patients are treated when they partnered with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. After interviewing patients about their satisfaction level, they came up with a simple suggestion: Offer patients visiting for chemotherapy a schedule of their day. That way the patients will know if they have time for a cup of coffee or a phone call, rather than facing the demoralizing prospect of having to sit and wait all day. "It's really the shift from letting things just happen to consciously designing them," Evenson says.
The idea is simple, but its potential effects are profound. "You want a patient that's going to tell their neighbor, 'You've just got to go there because the way I was treated helped me get better,'" Evenson says. With 80 percent of the economy devoted to services, the implications of service design have wide-ranging relevance for industries from electronics to food to health care. Though European designers and academics have been considering the issue for over a decade, Carnegie Mellon hopes to offer soon the U.S.'s first graduate degree in service design.
This type of "design thinking" can be brought to bear in any industry and can be used to create ones that don't yet exist, says Ringling's Thompson. As the college's head honcho, he's out to change the common perception that design is a luxury; in today's globally competitive marketplace, it's not. "How can you provide the kind of experience that your customers will relish? That is now what is differentiating service companies," he says. Designers are perfectly positioned to come in and offer advice because "they are not caught up in that industry."
After the inaugural summit last year, post-conference feedback was glowing. Organizers heard from people who had made career changes based on new ideas they had been exposed to during SIDS.
Franco Lodato was one of them. As a designer for Herman Miller, Motorola and Gillette, Lodato has designed everything from concept cars and cellphones to toothbrushes and wearable computers. A longtime student of organic forms, Lodato attended last year's conference and met David Fries, a USF marine scientist whose specialty is fabricating high-resolution biomorphic surfaces that look and feel just like the real thing, be it wood, stone or shark skin. After Fries and Lodato got to talking about the technology's applications — from high-end watch faces to designing a foul-resistant skin for boats (preventing organic matter from growing on the hull) — Lodato jumped ship from Herman Miller and moved to Florida.
"I expect to see more of these interdisciplinary meetings happen, where people from different walks of life are coming together and spilling over into each other's sandbox," Fries says.
The summit's founders hope that the event's unique design will help put the region — and its businesses and universities — on the map as a creative hub. Ringling has already begun to reap the benefits. After last year's summit, the design college had its best and brightest pursued by a new cadre of recruiters from companies that attended the summit: Philips, Target and General Motors, to name a few.
Ringling also hopes to train the next generation of designers equipped for thinking about the big picture. In addition to its traditional majors (e.g., Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics, Game Art and Design, Illustration, and Interior Design), the college will offer a new major starting in fall 2008 called the Business of Art and Design, which combines business curriculum with an in-depth study of the creative process. "Its not just about the skill. The big part is the conceptual thinking," Thompson says. "It's about how that kind of conceptual thinking can be translated into other kinds of environments."
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.