«Depuis octobre, le design thinking est devenu un gros buzzword à Paris. Tout le monde parle de ça! La D School [institut parisien de design thinking qui collabore avec Stanford] est sollicitée par de grands groupes comme Michelin, Bosch, Nestlé…», dit Florence Mathieu, une ingénieure industrielle dont la jeune pousse Aïna applique les méthodes de la pensée design pour concevoir des produits et services pour une clientèle d’aînés.

Florence, qui est très proche de ses deux grands-mères, a vu dans le marché grandissant des baby-boomers à la retraite plusieurs occasions de solutions à imaginer.

À commencer par la salle de bains. Le premier produit issu de la démarche de design thinking d’Aïna a été un «mobilier connecté» pour cette pièce, qui a été pensé autour de la position assise. Sorte de coiffeuse repensée, il est doté d’une chaise qui se tire, d’une prise électrique à proximité, de beaucoup de rangements, afin de faciliter la toilette et d’éviter de trop devoir lever les bras.

Pendant un an, donc, Florence Mathieu a plongé dans l’univers des aînés, promenant son calepin de notes ethnographiques de domicile privé en maison de retraite, pour comprendre les besoins quotidiens des citoyens âgés, des patients, des aides-soignants…

«Pour moi, il s’agissait de me mettre en empathie pour comprendre leur réalité, afin de créer des prototypes et de tester des solutions.»

Le projet a super bien fonctionné, si bien que nous avons pu sortir rapidement un produit innovant qui ne stigmatise pas.

«J’aime le design thinking parce qu’il exploite le côté humain, créatif, en parallèle d’une réflexion stratégique. Cela correspondait à ma personnalité.»

On the day that my husband died, I was two weeks short of my sixty-seventh birthday, and I thought that once I got through the terrible grief and the distress of having to leave the rolling grasslands of southern Saskatchewan, where I’d lived for thirty–three years, for Calgary, I would still have time ahead of me in which to enjoy a wonderful new life. Glimmering faintly on the horizon were art galleries; concert halls; the opera; professional theatre; new, like-minded friends; and maybe, some day, even a relationship. But what I didn’t have a clue about was that I was about to be old nor about what being old would mean to my dreams and desires. I suppose this is because, while dreading old age with every fibre, I was, at the same time, in full denial that it would ever happen to me, and so I was shocked down to the soles of my feet when it did…

The day old age strikes, our lives appear comfortable, even privileged, but our hearts are numb with permanently thwarted desire, our throats choked with longing for things we will never have again, and our future, we are sure, is too bleak to contemplate. We stare in terror into the abyss and ask ourselves: Who am I now?
I struggled in the face of all this, as my body changed and grew more fragile no matter what I did to stop it and as younger people started ignoring me or treating me as if I were a not-very-smart, obstinate child. And because of my less robust physicality, and my new single state, I was having to cut away things I used to do: bike riding, cross-country skiing, extensive hiking, adventurous travelling, and participating in many after-dark outings. How on earth was I to find this “wonderful” new life?
What I was facing is ubiquitous but fairly new in the span of human history. Even as recently as the early 1900s, when we all died at much younger ages, people over sixty were fairly rare and, in Western society, easy to ignore. But today, nearly 6 million Canadians are senior citizens. Never before in North American history have older adults formed such a large proportion of the population. And since women tend to live longer than men, the older the age group, the higher the percentage of females. Women like me, now in our late seventies and alone for the first time in many years, find ourselves socializing almost exclusively with women and rarely meet a single male (whether we are interested in finding one or not). We have to rethink what we value because so much of our life has reached fruition; we’ve worked to fulfill career goals, buy the dream house or country cottage, meet new partners, start new families, get doctorates, and live securely as respected, useful elders within our own multi-aged clans. Now we have to find meaning in places we might not have bothered about when we were younger and half of a couple: solitude, friendship, bird and animal watching, and a closer following of music, painting, and theatre. This replacement alone can be a soul-wrenching shift that forces us to ask ourselves: What matters now?

The Walrus