The Future of Ageing

Existing research on technology adoption, consumer psychology, and gerontology focuses on functional barriers – cost, access, usability – while under-exploring the psychological, emotional, and cultural factors that may be more determinative.

Across all STEEP dimensions and all regions studied, one pattern emerges: people resist products that position them as “old.” This is not just a psychological barrier at the individual level. Interventions must address identity at system level, not just product level.

These adoption barriers of identity, stigma, and framing over functionality will likely replicate as AI-powered products reach aging populations, making this research relevant beyond traditional product categories.

Ground – primary field research (2022–2025, pre-RCA)

This is the grounding the RCA thesis project was built on, and the source of the identity-based user rejection finding.

• Qualitative interviews. Older adults, physicians and caregivers on experience, worldview and product choice. US and Switzerland.
• Observational fieldwork. Older adults navigating urban life in Zurich, Munich, and Copenhagen.
• Longitudinal product observation. Early tracking of ageing household categories: what reaches the market, how it enters homes, how it is used, and how it is adopted or refused.
• Open literature scanning. Ageing, gerontology, design, retail, consumer psychology and policy, read before any framework existed to sort it into.
• Initial product landscape and stakeholder mapping. A first map of the ageing product and service system.

Diagnose – reading why a system holds

• Causal-loop mapping. Five feedback loops holding a market failure in place, built as an interactive artefact.
• Leverage-point analysis. Identified where intervention could change behaviour and shift the system.
• Value-chain analysis. Adapted Porter’s six stages to locate where failure originates rather than where it shows up, applied across several products and several kinds of organisation.
• Evolved ecosystem and stakeholder mapping. Placed actors against the value-chain stage they can influence in primary and secondary tiers, with investment mapped as a separate layer.
• Diagnostic instrument design. Designed an original framework of three alignment conditions, three gap types and six value-chain stages. Built an interactive input tool and output page: enter a product and it returns where the failure sits, how severe it is, and how urgent. Every diagnosis is stored, so cases accumulate into a comparable set.
• Historical cultural coding. An object’s meaning traced from 1700 to the present, with a Jobs-to-be-Done layer asking what the object was bought for in each era: e.g. status, style, medical necessity.
• Critical source appraisal. An annotated review of 23 literature and practice sources selected for what they added or for changing my position.
• Research knowledge architecture. Built a 461-page structured vault with live query dashboard over the top.

Scan – reading where a system is going

• Horizon scanning. Continuous collection across eight target markets, tiered by research priority, structured on STEEP/PESTLE domains and layered on Sharpe’s Three Horizons.
• Macro foresight synthesis. STEEP/PESTLE by Three Horizons grid, built from institutional foresight and policy reporting on global megatrends, outside the subject literature. Set the drivers for the 2050 worldbuilding.
• Signal infrastructure design. A two-layer database of 88 macro and 496 micro signals.

Envision – making a preferable future tangible

• Speculative worldbuilding. A documented set of rules for the 2050 world, holding both systems and the lived experience in all decision-making.
• Autoethnography. A first-person day-in-the-life carrying entrepreneurship itself as the worldbuilding practice, with my decisions as the mechanism the world is built through.
• Diegetic prototyping. The BOLD product family built as artefacts from inside the world, each one a diagnosed gap closed, with a features dossier and a catalogue-from-the-future format.
• Speculative image production. Speculative visualisation of the 2050 world across global forces, domains, and products.

Coordinate – moving actors together

• Strategic backcasting. The route from the 2050 world back to the present, traced through the same diagnostic that identified the failures. Each gap closed in the future has a present-day action attached.
• Theory of change. A map of how the system could move: five routes from where it is now to where it needs to be, each with the action required, who has to take it, and what has to hold true. Four of the five routes are structural and one works through culture.