Designing for Longevity—Products, Services, and Systems

Across every world region, population ageing is accelerating and altering how people live, work, move, and finance their later lives, placing new demands on the design of products, services, and systems. Older adults are not a niche; they are an increasingly large and diverse share of the population with heterogeneous capabilities, cultures, and preferences, whose needs intersect with housing, transport, banking, digital health, and public services. Treating ageing as a retrofit challenge—adding larger fonts here or handrails there—underestimates both the complexity and the opportunity of longevity. Designing for longevity requires a multi‐level approach that integrates inclusive products, supportive services, and enabling systems so that older adults can exercise autonomy, maintain connection, and participate in economic and civic life. Because ageing is not only about chronological years but about functional ability, the design emphasis shifts from fixing the person to fixing the context: environments, interfaces, and institutions that accommodate sensory, motor, and cognitive variation over time. This chapter develops a practical and theoretical foundation for such work. It proposes that longevity design unfolds at three nested scales—micro (products and interfaces), meso (services and platforms), and macro (systems and ecosystems)—and that success depends on co-creation with older adults, adherence to accessibility standards, and institutional architectures (often public–private partnerships or public–private-people partnerships) that can scale what works while safeguarding rights, privacy, and equity. The argument is not that every device must be for seniors, but that mainstream design should anticipate change and diversity, offering graceful adaptation across the life course in ways that are aesthetically desirable and economically viable.