The Value of Aging

‘Unclaimed’ exhibition at the Barbican

Today, I visited the Barbican exhibition ‘Unclaimed’, an installation highlighting various aspects of the process of growing older in today’s British society. In context of my current unit of Global Design Futures I got especially interested in one focus of the exhibition – the value attributed to aging.

The installation displayed outstanding research findings and quotes to the topics addressed in a setting of old lost- and- found items. This combination made me think about current trends in our society not only with regards to people, but also to items and their changing value perception.

In the workplace there is a controversial perception of age, as found by the University of Sheffield. According to this, advancing age can lead to a positive as well as negative discrimination:

Atul Gawande is cited in this context:

These quotes show to me that in former times, aging was mainly seen as a value addition to a person, because an older age indicated reliability, a greater wealth of experience and knowledge, as well as an understanding of traditions and history. For this, advanced age was paid respect to. Nowadays, there is a negative connotation to aging as well, as it is connected to a slower ability to learn new things.

According to the leaflet of the exhibition ‘One in three people in the UK today will reach their 100th birthday.’ Our living standard and scientific innovations make it possible that society grows older than ever, so being old is not a seldom phenomenon any more.

Although not mentioned in the exhibition I see a connection to many of the products displayed in the installation of the museum- aged products with mostly not much value attributed anymore. Sky News (Vittozzi, 2018) published an article about the current throw-away culture. They state that ‘fewer than one in 10 people in the UK attempt to repair or restore items if they are broken’. On the one hand there is a lack of abilities to repair things, on the other hand built-in obsolescence and difficulties to repair or update things encourage people to buy new products. In addition, there is also a great desire for new products in our society (Lyons, 2018). From my perspective, this trend is based on the wrong assumption that resources for producing new goods are endless.

A parallel may be drawn to the training of older employees:

The University of Sheffield has discovered that training of older people is provided at the latest. In consequence, this makes them less productive and competitive.

But, unlike products that are simply disposed at the end of their useful period, older employees are still part of the working society. All of this can be summarised as: People live longer, products get disposed faster.

In the exhibition, there is the request for a ‘new world order’ with regards to the increasing aging population. I would like to extend this even and request: How can aging people and aging products get a place in society where they are still valued?

One quote displayed by Molly Andrews made me think positive: ‘The future is open to any possibility’. It is on us to shape it.

Reference List:

Vittozzi, K. (2018) ‘We throw away millions of items that could be repaired’, Sky News, 4 November. Available at: https://news.sky.com/story/we-throw-away-millions-of-items-that-could-be-repaired-11544441 (Accessed: 21 April 2019).

Lyons, K. (2018) ‘Can we fix it? The repair cafes waging war on throwaway culture’, The Guardian, 15 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/can-we-fix-it-the-repair-cafes-waging-war-on-throwaway-culture (Accessed: 21 April 2019).