Abstract

"The Greying Market: Product Design and the Creation of an Elderly Consumer Market"

Andrew Simpson, Duquesne University (simpson4@duq.edu)

In the late 1980s, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller launched an ambitious program named Metaform to design a range of new products for elderly and disabled consumers. Led by designers William Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the central idea was to "help people remain active and independent as they age," allowing for an emerging group of wealthy, aging, Americans remain in their homes or their communities. Herman Miller's attempt to capture this market was not unique. By the time Metaform was announced, it was clear that the way Americans understood the social and economic role of the aged had shifted from the Depression-era understandings of the elderly as a social burden to a new sense of the wealthy elderly as a potent political force and vastly underserved market. Using Metaform as a representative example, this paper will draw from William Stumpf's papers, Herman Miller corporate archives, and the papers of universal design practitioner Marc Harrison, to explore how product design in areas like housing and consumer goods gradually embraced the graying market. In doing so, it will also seek to understand what the limitations of this strategy were for design practitioners and corporations (Metaform was canceled by the early 1990s). While the story of designing for disability has received attention from recent scholars, efforts to tap a greying market, which is both a part of and also separate from this story, has received far too little attention from business historians or historians of aging. Understanding the creation of a greying market speaks to larger social and economic changes occurring in the political economy of the twentieth-century United States and helps to explain the rise of the current, and seemingly ubiquitous argument, about the importance of the Baby Boomers as critical drivers of the American consumer economy.