Full transcript:
Tracy: In our last episode, entrepreneurial learner and doer Jenny Jin inspired us with her work at MIT teaching students how to design their own lives. Today, we introduce you to aging and climate change expert Dr. Mick Smyer and his Graying Green Movement, which aims to engage more older adults in taking impactful action on climate change. Among his many accomplishments, Mick is the former Provost and a current Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University. In addition, in his second-year sabbatical, he's currently working on Graying Green as a civic innovation Fellow at Stanford d.school, learning the power of applying design thinking to social activism. And maybe most impressive are his prodigious skills as a washboard player with New Orleans own Rustical Quality String Band.
I wondered if you could share in your own words, what you've been up to, and what you're interested in around the topic of design.
Mick: Sure, I'm a psychologist by training and have spent my whole career focus on aging, particularly in the last two years, I focused on the intersection of aging and climate change trying to link to global patterns, population aging, and climate change. And I'm interested in the design aspects of how to apply human-centered design principles and concepts to accelerate older adults’ visibility and value on climate action.
Tracy: And what got you interested in this intersection, because I know that it's not an immediately common one that people are used to hearing about.
Mick: It's funny, because, for me, it's pretty obvious that is, if you look at the world, right now, there are two global patterns that are happening, the United States is in a unique position in that we've been able to handle three transitions sequentially: an economic development transition, a demographic transition to an aging society and the third transition is the reaction to in response to climate concern. But there's a lot of the world right now that's trying to deal with all three simultaneously. And here I'm thinking, for example of Brazil or China, China's a rapidly aging society. It's also trying to move ahead on the economic development front. And it's committed to dealing straightforwardly with the climate threat. So it strikes me that it's an interesting time, and it's an important time in the next 10 years that are critical on climate action. And they turn out to be an interesting 10 years for the aging of our population as well.
Chris: Can you give us some floor examples where aging and climate change meet?
Mick Sure, the intersection of aging and climate change happens most frequently in three ways. First, older adults as consumers, we know that older adults continue to consume durable goods and expand their carbon footprint through their mid-70s, at least. And so there's an opportunity for getting that sizable and growing portion of the population to think about their own consumption patterns that model other consumption patterns for the rest of society. Second, older adults could be casualties of climate change. We know that older adults are one of the vulnerable populations that various reports have pointed to recently vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events like drought or floods. For example, in my hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, older adults were disproportionately represented in terms of mortality, but also in terms of morbidity and emergency room visits. And third, and maybe most importantly, older adults can be seen as a valuable resource as campaigners and people who can be active on the climate front. The world right now has about 1 billion people 60 and over. By the mid-century, that figure will be 2 billion and the century will be 3 billion people 60 and over. So if we're going to come up with climate solutions that are good to engage for parts of the population. Older adults have to be part of the development of those solutions and the implementation of those solutions.
Tracy: And so what brought you to the world of design? How did you get interested in design thinking, how did you end up doing this fellowship at Stanford?
Mick: While I was on another fellowship at Stanford at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a friend of mine from Babson College, Cheryl Kaiser said, stop talking to the social scientists and the gerontologist, those are yours, your strengths, and your skill sets. Go talk to people in the design school. And her insight was absolutely right on the money because Cheryl understood that the design school would give me a new set of skills and a new set of framing to accelerate my process.
Tracy: And what was interesting to you about design as a process, like did you have any understanding or expectation of it when you first became aware?
Mick: I had some understanding of it. On the one hand, it seemed very familiar, because as a clinical psychologist, the human-centered aspects and starting with the humans, you're concerned with, you're starting with the client’s perspective, was very familiar, although maybe using different terminology in clinical or community psychology. On the other hand, there were other habits of thinking that I had to sort of set aside as a social science. I'm used to trying to get a sample that represents the general population so that I can generalize to the entire population. Sometimes in design thinking, you may want to interview people at either end of the distribution, the extremes, because you can learn a lot from those extreme users. Well, that's a very different way to think about what the sample means. Sometimes in design thinking, we talk about doing an experiment. In the social sciences, an experiment means that either you control or control for a variety of other factors. And then look at the impact of one factor, for example, whereas in design thinking, you're basically saying, let's take the ecology as it is, let's take the world as it is, and let's go out and do something and see what kind of impact and feedback we get. And so it kind of flips it 180 degrees and says, we know we're not going to control everything. But let's see what happens when we work in that complex. Does that make sense?
Chris: It makes sense, especially the ability to quantify population and that's often a point of resistance where science meets human-centered design. Just taking a step back, I'm curious, what got you into this field overall, and was it were you led by climate and then came across aging? Or what was the path for you into this space?
Mick: Well, that's a really good question, Chris, I think I am passionate about climate change in aging. And for me, the lead-in and I think this is true for most people. It was a personal connection. I mentioned earlier that I'm from New Orleans, going to New Orleans after Katrina, it was not caused by climate change. But we now know that more extreme weather events like Katrina, or Hurricane Sandy, are frequent, and they're on the increase with climate change patterns. But seeing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and going to New Orleans with groups of students to do Katrina rebuilds, 10 years after the storm. So I went down seven or eight years in a row with students from Bucknell University and seeing my hometown reliant on the kindness of strangers to rebuild made the climate connection, just palpable for me. And so then I begin to ask myself, well, what can I do about climate change? And I realized, I'm not a climate scientist, but I am a gerontologist, I know something about aging and older adults. And so I thought, well, that's what I can bring into the climate discussion. Are there ways to make older adults whose voices heard more effectively on climate change and climate action?
Chris: And tying that back to design, these are big subjects with high volumes of people and climate change is exponentially complex. So you mentioned experiments in the design world, tell us about where design and big science meet at that intersection of kind of small and low fidelity and enlightened trial and error.
Mick: I would say I'm in the transition phase of getting used to that because, on the one hand, my aspirations are to try, to help move the needle on the big and complex issues. On the other hand, my capacity, even leveraging others’ efforts and support is pretty modest. So the trick is, how do you see the connection. The trick is to see the connection between small scale, low fidelity experiments, and the larger issues that I'm trying to work on. So I think that's that really took some getting used to. On the flipside, however, is that the bias towards action, the drive to do things out in the world, fail quickly, and learn from those failures means that you're moving ahead pretty quickly, in a way that just is not the case with the social science research methodology that I would traditionally have used.
Tracy: Hey, Mick, do you want to tell them what you did last week?
Mick: Yeah, well, last week, for example, we had what we call a sprint. So I had three days, developed an experiment, put something out in the world, and got some feedback on it. So coming out of the earlier work I've been doing in the d.school at Stanford, I decided that I wanted to hear older adults' voices on climate change and I developed a Facebook page called Old People Don't Care About Climate Change. It was a takeoff on a title from a funnier video, maybe you've seen it called Old People Don't Care About Climate Change, and really, it was a feasibility study to see could we get people to post and to respond to this Facebook page thinking and I was thinking of it first as a feasibility study of using social media for that kind of engagement. And secondly, is the sort of bottom rung or entry rung of the ladder of engagement and climate action. So in three days, with the help of one of my fellow fellows, Mario and with Tracy's good direction, we were able to launch and get really interesting responses from people.
Chris: Can you share a couple of those I'm really curious about, now that you've taken us this far, I can't wait to hear that kind of word ended up.
Mick: A couple of things happen. One is people posting on the page. And then that was actually affecting other people who then posted in response, which you know, is obviously, that's what happens. But, for example, I'm just looking at the page. Now, one person posting about her dad, who she described to us, she's not sure he's old, come see 63. And he wouldn't want to be called old. But he's been very much a model of responsiveness on the climate issue growing on his own food and various things. And she went on to talk about how that has influenced her. Another person said I'm an old person, I'm sure you care about climate change. I'm not blind to the fact that right now we're experiencing one of the most severe droughts western North Carolina has ever seen. And I know these extreme weather events are happening everywhere. What kind of earth are we leaving our grandchildren and our children? Yes, we care. And that was in response to somebody else's posting about how little time she has left, and wanting to use it, knowing that she knows her, she's an older adult and realizes that she has a limited lifespan ahead. That's not unlimited. She wants to use her time working on climate issues.
Chris: It reminds me that, you know, these topics can be heavy. Is there a technique that you've used or seen used that lightens the mood so that more people come into this conversation?
Mick: The Facebook page is kind of snarky and that's by design, one of the folks that we had taken a look at the prototype said stick with the slark. And, and that's why we started with the funny, satirical, as right as the kickoff, Freud said, humor is a mature defense. So I'm all for humor. I think it's you know, you have to keep a sense of humor, even as things are difficult. It's important to have that sense of snark. But also, it's a serious issue. You know, the National Academy of Sciences when they talk about climate change communication, although they were talking about for K through 12. And millennials, I think the lessons apply for any age group, they said, keep it short, social and positive, short in terms of timeframe. So don't talk about your carbon footprint in 10,000 years, because our brains aren't wired to think in those terms. Think about three or four generations, that's about the timeframe that we can understand social in terms of connecting to people in places that we care about. In fact, that was the starting point that I originally started with, in terms of the Facebook page, I was going to ask people to talk about a place that they care about really emerged more into sort of our responses to the satire to try to get older adults to express their strong feelings and a lot of times it does link to specific places, but people are playing people or places a personal connection, like my connection to New Orleans is often important. But the third part is really important and that is positive. Try to focus not only on what's happening but what are the things that we can do in response to climate change. That's part of what I'm trying to work on now: how do we frame realistic actions in the face of some very, very difficult challenges?
Chris: Find design to be a kind of look at these challenges, it tends to look at them more optimistically, and looks to get inspired to action, have you found that with design? And if so, what have you seen out there that really, maybe from another field or in this field really inspires you around like, wow, more like that, you know, if we can keep that up we will see the kind of change we all wish we could see?
Mick: There is a built-in assumption in the design process that you can make a change, and that you can have an impact. And the climate is one of those areas where that's pretty challenging. On the other hand, I think the design process assumes you can have some impact, and the small impacts are going to eventually affect and leverage the larger issues. And in a way that's sort of synonymous with what many older adults feel, as one of the people said, on the Facebook page, I'm committed to being an example of how important climate changes to the future of life on Earth, with whatever time I have left, folks, at a certain point in life, say 65, 70, 75 know that they're not going to be round from any of the harsher impacts of climate change. But that doesn't mean they're saying, oh, and therefore, I don't have to worry about it. So I think the underlying optimism of design, principles of thinking and approaches, resonates with older adults who say, Look, I'm realistic, but I'm also going to get out there and try to do it.
Tracy: You know, climate change is something that we have helped inspire to pick up the pace. So if we've created climate change, by design that was unintentional, and I would imagine that we could, we could undo the effects of it by intentionally designing our way out of it.
Mick: The reason I'm reluctant, I've spent a lot of time with climate scientists that reading the reports, and, you know, even looking at the recent National Geographics special, Leonardo DiCaprio, I mean, we are in very, very difficult situations, which doesn't mean that we can't do things about it and can't turn things around, we can. But the timing is really important. And that's in part why I think these next 10 years are really important, both for climate but also for the aging population. And by that, I mean, the next 10 years, the boomers are coming into a time when they're the early leading edge of the boomers are already there. And the trailing edge will get there a time when they have time, energy, and resources to focus on issues that will give them meaning and purpose in later life. Well, that happens to be the same 10 years where we really have to get action on climate change. So I think that any political or civic leader who's going to make a local regional or national effort on climate change has to bring along older adults as a large part of that coalition.
Tracy: I like when we first met you were talking about that age time period in someone's life as sort of a second college experience, or I forget, you said it much more eloquently.
Mick: There is this phase in later life that's like being in your 20s. And by that, I mean, oftentimes, you're faced with issues like where am I gonna live? Where are my friends gonna be? And how am I going to pay for it? And if you're the parent of a 20, something, those are pretty familiar issues, only now, you come at that in your later life, with a set of experiences and a set of priorities. And so it's a very interesting mix. And we also don't have great models for this phase of life. I sometimes call today's older adults. So the Lois and Clark Scouts of aging, you know, when Lois and Clark set out and sent us out back to tell Jefferson what they were finding. And in many ways, today's older adults and us and the folks who preceded us, are really learning what the landscape of old age cannon could be. And we're giving reports back to those who follow us.
Chris: I think that's really the thing. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about exposure, just the idea of, you know, when you are exposed to new ideas, or new insights, or like you're talking about having people say, this is what it's like to be this age, that allows you the freedom then to make bigger bolder decisions and choices just because you know, that they're out there to be made.
Mick: Well, that I think you're right, Tracy and there's also a clear sense of changing sense of time, a psychologist here at Stanford, Laura Carstensen, has written eloquently about the way in which our sense of time changes with age, so that's somewhere in your mid-50s or so, maybe a little later, maybe a little earlier for some people, you get us at your time senses shifts to a sense of time left to live that pretty quickly focuses you on. So what's important to me? Who are the people who are important to me? What are the activities that are important to me? What are my priorities? If I have limited time left to live, even if that limit is 16, 20, 25 years?
Chris: Mick, what you're doing for me right now is just shattering a lot of myths. Are there other common myths about aging and or climate or the combination that you commonly hear that you find to be quite contrary?
Mick: Well yeah, I mean, there are a lot of myths about aging. In fact, Laura Carstensen has a book called a Long Bright Future that's framed around basic lists of aging, things like most people are miserable. Well, in fact, no happiness and life satisfaction peaks late in life, once you relieve the everyday burdens and stresses of childcare and raising a family and work-family balance in a way that is pretty intense in midlife. Boy, that's pretty darn good. You know, so I think the other thing is that we tend to paint all older people with one brush. And so there's a myth of uniformity about old age. But in fact, variability increases with age. If you take a group of seven-year-olds and a group of 77-year-olds, the 77-year-olds are going to be more different from each other than the seven-year-olds are. And why that is the lifetime impact of both environmental and genetic influences, and experiences. You know, the experience has been fairly common up to age 70. By 77, some people have smoked, some people haven't, some people have had a lot to drink. Some people aren't overweight, some people are physically fit, some people have had education for 12 years, some dropped out of high school. Some people worked in hazardous occupations, others didn't. And so the cumulative effect of all of those individual decisions and opportunities lead to very different paths and outcomes in labor.
Chris: What are the common myths that need to be debunked? I think this is you've just completely shattered. I think what most people think about aging, so why don't we just go ahead and do that for climate change while we're at it?
Mick: I mean, the big myth that I struggle with sometimes is that older people don't care about climate change. But in fact, the data are pretty clear that older adults do care about the data, and by this, I mean social science surveys, for example, the Yale Project On Climate Change Communication reports data that suggests that boomers are as concerned if not more, so, about climate change, as millennials. So I think there's the myth that older people are just greedy, geezers, I've got mine, and it's and after I die problem, that's just not the case. And the reason for that is pretty simple. Because we're wired to think about future generations, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, we're wired to think about whether our gene pool is going to survive? So but even beyond that, you know, psychologically, we're wired to think about the impact of things like climate change on future generations. And so older adults do care about climate change. And yet, most climate scientists and most climate communicators have overlooked this important growing resource. When I talk to them about older adults and climate change in aging. I usually get a one-word answer from scientists, and that word is hot. And I now understand that science speaks for this, not a crazy idea. I just never thought of it. And it's that over oversight that I'm trying to remedy.
Tracy: And I really love that because I was telling Mick, like, when those things happen, that is when you have a great opportunity for design, right? It hasn't been explored yet.
Mick: You're absolutely right, Tracy and then what I find with various groups is once I get beyond the heart, and the first time I got hot, I was really worried. But now I'm ready for it. But once I get beyond that, then I find most folks are willing to play with the ideas to say, well, what would it look like? Or how might we engage older adults? And it's interesting, even if the flip side happens with folks who work in aging arenas, getting them to think about climate change because I'm starting to get the hunger response from them. In other words, it's not just bringing aging to climate change, but bringing climate change to aging. I still get a huh. What if we looked at it this way, and I think you're right. That's where the design process really kicks in.
Tracy: On that note, I wonder, since you're in this new phase of trying design out and applying it to your many years of expertise in aging, could you talk a little bit about how you think about design or how do you talk to other people about it, what the process is one of the things that we you know, it's like, we're always trying to figure out new ways to talk to more people about it and make it relevant to them. And so I'm just curious since you're in this reality, you're in a sweet spot, right now, you know, what it is, you're trying it out for yourself, and you're applying it to something that you've been looking at, in a completely different lens?
Mick: Sure. But you know, it's like asking a pilot who's certified for visual flight rules and six years to talk about landing a 737? Well, you know, somebody asked me, Well, what is human-centered design, and the bumper sticker I came up with was, start with humans, and with solutions. And for me, that's a good summary, starting with humans is really important. So going out, talking to the folks that you're trying to engage is really the critical first step, and being open to learning things that you didn't, you didn't even know you didn't know. And it's that openness, and the deep empathy work that I think really is important as a first step.
Tracy: Were there any experiences that you had in that empathy-building phase that have stood out to you like anything that really threw you for a loop or changed your perspective?
Mick: Yes, I was doing one of our experiments or phases, given a woman I was interviewing for a card sort with a lot of different individual actions you can take on climate change. And she sorted them into piles of her own making. And there was this large pile and I said to her, what's that pile? She said, Well, you know, I rent, and those are all things that my landlord can take care of, but I can't. I can't control us. So my next interview happened to be with a woman who was the landlady, not the same, not the landlady, the first person, but a person who had a rental property. So I gave her the card store. And she had a big pile. And I said, well, what is that pile? She said, Well, those are all things that my tenant can do, but I can't control them. And what, and what struck me was that this was a great metaphor for the problem of the comments, nobody feels like they can control, they have control over a lot of actions that make a difference. There are solutions to that, in this case, I, you know, I prototyped, a little green lease, and try that out with another lady who was very interested in it not for the environmental reasons, but for the economic reasons, she could probably say to people, yes, the rent is high. But look I've invested in and these actions are going to save you on utilities and the like. But the point is, the first two people I talked to both felt relatively powerless to make straightforward, simple changes because they felt somebody else was responsible for them. That's the kind of conclusion I would not have come to, other than sitting down talking to people giving them time, and taking my leads.
Chris: What do you wish the design crowd could know about the scientific crowd? Because you, as Tracy pointed out, you kind of straddle both worlds? And what do you wish for the designers out of your prior work?
Mick: Right? I'm the design whisperer to the social sciences. And the whisper to the design crew, I think is both and not either-or. In other words, I think there are some things that you can take from social science findings, and then use those as a starting point or as a kickoff point, for a deeper dive using design processes. For example, the first part of my project I spent with folks at the Yale Project On Climate Change Communication and looking at their survey data, helping them re-analyze it and reframe it from a generational perspective. That allowed me to have the insight that we have older people who do care about climate change. So now armed with that insight from quantitative data, I can then do a deep dive in empathy work and elsewhere and say, Well, how do they fear and how can we make that manifest? So I think there's, I think both and I think the work of both sides is enriched by being able to sample from the other side, however. It sounds easy, but it seems to me it requires respect for the methods and insights from both sides. And that's, and that's tricky, I think.
Tracy: Well, I think that goes back then again, to what we're well what I was talking about with exposure, right. It's like without being exposed to an understanding of the other side, it's hard to have that respect for historically, we've worked in separate fields. And so it hasn't really come together. As we kind of wrap up, I wonder, for the audience's listening, what are some things that they could be thinking about or doing around the topic of climate change and thinking about aging, either for themselves or people in their lives? What are some steps that they could take? Or ways to look at things a little bit differently?
Mick: Well, I think the first step I would take is to realize that the older adults in your environment, the older adults around you, are the keepers of living climate memory. They remember what the climate was like, in your local area, or in their local area 50, 60, 70 years before this, they can tell you what the changes are like because they've seen them. And so one first thing that anybody can do is ask older people that, you know, what changes have you seen in the area that you live in? Whether it's the plant life or the water, whatever it is, precipitation. So part of what I'm saying is taking advantage of that living climate memory. The second thing I would urge people to do is to think about their local and regional area and ask themselves, what am I doing to lessen my impact on the climate in my local and regional area, we all have an impact. And there are simple things we can do, whether it's doing more walking, drive, less, recycle, all those sorts of things. But then there are regional responses that require collective action. And some people are uncomfortable with that. But increasingly, mayors and governors are taking the lead, to make sure that the regional solutions are looked at and pursued. And that requires political leadership, but also political support. So if you're already doing individual things, think about well, what can I do collectively? What's the next step for me if I'm doing most of the things that I could do individually, maybe the next step for us to get involved collectively, whether it's signing a petition or joining a Climate March or going to a city council meeting, that's considering the sustainability plan for your region. So I think those are things that each of us could do, and ways in which each of us could get involved. But the main thing I think we need to do is to remember that more adults are a resource for families, for communities, and for regions. They not only are living memories of what climate change has occurred in their lifetimes, but they also are visionaries of how we might respond, and what kind of actions we do take to make sure we get ahead of the climate dilemmas that we're now facing.
Tracy: Continued success as you explore this through the lens of design thinking, I know that one of the things that you're looking to answer is, what are those steps? And how, how do people sort of ladder up in engagement and be more committed and have an impact on the larger scale? So we'll look forward to hearing more about that when you've gotten further.
Mick: Sounds good. Of course, I have a great advisor.
Tracy: Thanks a lot.
Chris: The best.
Tracy: All right. Thanks, Nick.
Chris: Yeah, that was fascinating. I think the intersection of aging and climate change alone is an unlikely pairing. Ageism in the country, we didn't get to talk much about that, I'd love to talk to him more about where that's heading is that's trending up, down or backward or forwards. But applying design thinking and merging that with his scientific background seems like an extremely potent place to be. So he's a fascinating, fascinating guy.
Tracy: And he's, I mean, what I really felt honored having a chance to work with him on this, he is so open and willing to just jump in and try things. I mean, he just kind of being modest about his, you know, experiments and things that he's tried, but he tries so many different experiments every week. I feel like oftentimes when people first learned about design thinking and they're unsure, they hold back and he doesn't at all. So it's really great to see and then also just thinking about how he is trying to pull together something that allows people to move past that change in your lightbulb stage, I think is really important. Because I think people do those little small steps they feel like they don't necessarily have a large impact in the world, and they get disenfranchised and move on. So I'm really fascinated to see kind of how this progresses throughout the rest of the year.
Chris: Yeah, I find it so inspiring to think about, you know, you kind of get your 20 something self back. I never thought about that time, quite that way before. And it makes so much sense because you are still valuable, you still have energy, you still have passion, and you get time back. And so that's one of the greatest values in the world is to have the time to actually attack some of these challenges. So I found that really inspiring just to have people with time back.
Tracy: Yeah, I did, too. I was like, Oh, great. I get to have my college, my college years back, but I don't have the responsibility of taking classes.
Chris: Well, thank you, Tracy. This was an awesome show. Thanks for setting up the time with Mick and yeah, I look forward to the next one. All right, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them. To do this really well. We'd love for you to participate. Try out and share back your own life design experiments. Or if you've already got a great story of how you've designed your life, we'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page, or resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you'll find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the episode. And if you would be so kind, subscribe to the show, and share your favorite episodes with friends. that'll let even more people start designing their own lives. A big thanks to the folks who help us make the show possible. composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the Results May Vary theme music, graphic designer Annessa Braymer for our logo, David Glazier for sound mixing, and team podcasts for editing and of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.