April 29, 2026

Transcript

Laurel: There's a quiet assumption built into most of the objects around us that the people using them are young, strong, agile. That they can see clearly, hear clearly, move easily. But for millions of people, especially as we age, the world starts pushing back a jar that won't open. A staircase that blocks the path, a door handle that refuses to turn these small moments add up.

And when they do, they reveal something important. Design shapes. Who gets to move through the world with dignity and who doesn't? This is Iterations, a podcast about creativity design, and the ideas that emerge when disciplines collide.

Laurel: I'm Laurel Hostak Jones. In this episode, the designer who changed the way the world thinks about aging, accessibility, and empathy by becoming someone else entirely.

Pattie: Oh, my formal name is Patricia Ann Moore. My family refers to me as Pattie Ann. My daddy called me P.A. My career name was Pat most deliberately because people didn't know if that was male or female.

And then somehow my familiar name of Pattie became known. The joke, of course, is as long as they call me, I don't care what they call me.

And that pretty much sets up my career path.

Laurel: Even if you haven't heard Pattie Moore's name before, chances are you're familiar with her work. Check your kitchen drawers. You might have a can opener or a potato peeler, or another tool from Oxo Good Grips. Pattie was instrumental in their development. She was also involved in the development of Depend undergarments, and she helped draft part of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But originally, Pattie planned to become a medical illustrator. She enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology to study exactly that. But in her first semester, everything changed.

Pattie: In the very first semester of my freshman year, they ended the program. And simultaneously a professor who'd been keeping an eye on me (unbeknownst to me) put a stack of journals from the Industrial Design Society in front of me one night and said, “have a look. I think you'd be good at this.” And I was camped out at his office door Monday morning, and I changed my major to industrial design, which is product design, and my whole life unfolded in that moment.

Laurel: The real beginning of Pattie's philosophy came much earlier. Before college, before design school, before she even knew what design was, it began with watching her grandparents.

Pattie: It was as a preschooler, I recognized how my grandparents who lived with us suffered throughout the course of everyday living, seeing my grandfather, who had been in World War I and needed to utilize a wheelchair for mobility, struggle and come to roadblocks in his path, which defined his day. What he could and could not do. It was heartbreaking because I saw the pain in his face, the frustration, the disappointment when he couldn't go into a restaurant, or visit somewhere, or someone because he couldn't walk. Seeing my grandmother making her evening meal, and hearing her pain as she tried to open the refrigerator door, and her arthritis precluded just that simple task. Those early observations ended up defining what I did by design much later in life.

Laurel: In the late 1970s, Moore developed a research method that would become legendary in the design world. She decided to experience aging firsthand. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Pattie: I was already living in New York, and I was working with Raymond Lowey, the father of American Product Design. I met a remarkable young woman named Barbara Kelly at one of those obligatory parties that you need to go to in New York to be polite and actively involved.

And when she told me she was a makeup designer, I asked her if she could make me look 85. At the time she was working for a new program called Saturday Night Live, and now she expanded her role into social science and made 26 years of age Pat Moore turn into Pat Moore, 85. So with prosthetic makeup, and all sorts of prostheses that altered my body's natural capacity, and wearing my grandmother's clothes, I began traveling throughout the US and Canada for nearly four years in the guise of an elder - to see how it felt to be called this thing called “old.”

Laurel: What she discovered was something most designers had never seen. The world looked very different depending on who you appeared to be.

Pattie: I learned that it was about a 50/50 proposition. Some days were just glorious and lovely. People were so kind and nice and friendly. And then sadly, the other half of the time, people were abusive and unkind, uncaring, considered me in the way, considered me an object, not a person. And didn't help me or extend a hand when it was clearly needed.

Laurel: For Pattie, that discovery changed everything. Because it confirmed something she had already suspected.

Pattie: And that of course, in its own right was thrilling as a designer doing research. Because it was proving what I believed to be true through my studies at Columbia in gerontology: that we were an age phobic culture and that with age, unfortunately, we were being forgotten or cast aside.

Laurel: That research became the foundation of Pattie's life's work. Her approach, while radical - and even in some cases dangerous - has inspired empathetic research models across disciplines. Here at Drexel University, Product Design professor June He teaches a community-based research course called “Aging and Design.”

In the course, Drexel students from various majors work with older adults in the Philadelphia community to co-develop products and services that improve quality of life before beginning side-by-side workshops with communities, however, students practice something very similar to Pattie's experiment.

They dawn special goggles and gloves to simulate limited mobility, arthritis, and low vision. They spend a day in someone else's shoes to better understand their challenges.

Pattie: Then I was able to take all that learning with me on the design journey, which was to create universality: design that gave equity to all people, so that they could have a high quality of life by design. So they could have the dignity of life by design. So that all their consumer needs would be met appreciably, as they required. Without this polarity or without this distinction that because of their age, they didn't deserve a nice lifestyle, an easy lifestyle, or a lovely lifestyle.

Laurel: And the implications stretch far beyond mobility. They touch everything, including clothing.

Pattie: I think we saw it initially in fashion. Older women were starting to tell me how they wanted a very special dress for their granddaughter's wedding and there was just nothing available. And so many of them were turning to dress makers and seamstresses, but they were hard to find and they would bemoan the fact that there was nothing off the rack for them.

Laurel: Pattie is encouraged by the new movement toward universality in fashion design, like the work of Nancy Volpe Beringer. Who we spoke to in our last episode, who designs for everybody, never sacrificing style or agency.

Pattie: And I'm happy to say here we are, 50 years later we're looking at young fashion designers, realizing all of us deserve clothing of our choice, and especially clothing that we need, whether it's because of our arthritis, we need something a little more easy to get on and off. Or, because of our blood flow, we get cold faster and more frequently. And so maybe what we're wearing should account for that.

And that we're seeing women in the military and in the service of police and fire, how important all of that is. You know, I was telling students the other day - when I heard that NASA was going to do the double female astronaut spacewalk, I was so thrilled and I was so proud of being an American and, and knowing these two young, brave women in space were going to do this one of a kind spacewalk. Until we learned that NASA had only packed one spacesuit that fit an astronaut who happened to be female. And if that wasn’t egg on our face… Nothing tells about the disparity by design that still exists today. We have a lot of work yet to do.

Laurel: Pattie also changed the way companies talked about accessibility because sometimes the barrier isn't design. It's language.

Pattie: The reason I don't use “disability,” especially in a boardroom or with a corporation, the minute those people in charge hear that, they come at me with what I heard early in my career: “we don't design for those people.” So rather what I do is to say, “you know, some people have arthritis. Like my sister and you know, she's… [I make up an age] 37.” And they're, “oh, really?” And you know, and I'm telling a white lie, but it gets the conversation moving in the right direction. I say, “so if we had a latch that didn't require as much dexterity, we'd sell more product to more people,” and that lights up the room. That's what people wanna hear. And that's just good business. It's given opportunities to people to lead the life they wanna lead, and independence and autonomy are key to our self-concept and to our happiness.

Laurel: Today, Pattie's ideas are shaping conversations about one of the biggest demographic shifts in history: a rapidly aging population, and the new reality of aging in place.

Pattie: We're using terminology today called solo aging, and the numbers are stupefying. 40% of American households are single older people. That really wakes people up. So if you're looking at 50 or 55 plus and they're living alone, it speaks to a lot of changes culturally and socially.

Social needs are key. Having someone move in with me is going to keep me independent for longer. The other choice is for me to move into assisted living, or if my health fails, skilled nursing care. Very expensive proposition. So as long as we can keep all Americans independent and able to live in their own home, we’ll have a higher quality of life and lower cost, and that's going to reflect into our tax base as well.

Laurel: Pattie Moore sees design as a core component of health. Imagine, she says, if our homes were designed to support us medically.

Pattie: We shouldn't have to leave our homes, the safety and security of our homes to go to a clinic or a private physician for some very basic health parameters to be evaluated.

Companies like Toto in Japan were early performers in delivering the means by which just our void can be analyzed. That the device of a toilet - when I go in the morning and do what nature requires me to do - that it does a urinalysis. And if, in fact, I'm living with diabetes, it can alert not just me, but my physician, that my blood sugar's off. And is it actually at a point where I need to go into an office for some other remediation? Does my medication have to be changed, or is it information I should have directly? “Pattie, maybe you didn't eat enough veg yesterday, so let's try this. In your refrigerator right now, you have a head of lettuce, you have this, you have that. Let's make ourselves a salad.” And the complimentary piece of technology in terms of the appliance realm right now comes from Samsung, who's done a brilliant job of coming up with a refrigerator, which is the health hub of the home. So a smart refrigerator that analyzes expiration dates on what I have on hand, or absences - you know, you're out of cream, or you're out of this, you're out of that - and then the delivery comes. And all of this is taken care of for me because I no longer drive. That's a real benefit for me to stay healthy.

It's very inclusive and it's systemic and it's holistic and it's humane. All these things are quite simple and doable right now, but we haven't quite figured out a way to make it a consumer-driven arrangement for each and every day. We're getting very close, as I say, with those two companies alone, Samsung and Toto. We're getting very close to me never having to leave my home and being able to appreciably improve my health, maintain my health, and my independence.

Laurel: After decades in the field, Pattie still believes the most important design tools are surprisingly simple: kindness, curiosity, and paying attention.

Pattie: Things like just being kind and courteous. These are very simple things. This is not rocket science. Just being kind and aware and caring can redefine your whole life path, and it might just find you what you're supposed to do professionally too.

Keep a candy dish on your desk! You'll be very popular with people. And it's true - not that we should be eating sugar - but it's an icebreaker. You know, someone stops by my cubicle as a young designer and they see that candy dish, maybe they haven't met you yet, and they say “hello.” And I say, “can I really have a Hershey's kiss?” “Of course.” “Thank you.” You go ahead - and now you have a friendship. Now you have a fellowship. Now there's strength in numbers, and you get to find out about each other and your interests there in the office. You're both working in different divisions, but now you know about each other, you strengthen each other.

Laurel: Some of Pattie's work has had life-saving impact. She was on the team that helped develop mobile mammography programs, which brought cancer screening directly to workplaces and communities.

Pattie: I'm so honored to know the number of women's lives that have been saved, that a simple diagnostic has meant all the difference in the world. That a little child still has Mommy to grow with them, that a spouse didn't lose their beloved to this dreadful disease. But the real magic of mobile mammography was it made it easy for women to access the diagnostic. In its early days, it meant you had to take a day off work. Sometimes you had to drive from a rural setting to an urban setting to have the test and go home.

You lost income if you were a single parent. That was crucial. Just to know that we can give people that diagnostic with ease, that a van can move into a parking lot at an office tower and every woman can be scheduled to come down. And that all we're asking of the employers is to give them 20 minutes, off the clock, for this lifesaving test.

I'm so proud of all that technology and in the early days, Kodak film was one of our great supporters, because early mammography of course was on film. Now it's all digitized primarily, and that has met such a difference, as well as in colon cancer. Now that we can have, not a colonoscopy, which is invasive, but a Cologuard test that we can administer by ourselves at home, that raises a red flag. And then we can go through the rigors of colonoscopy. I'm not one to lie to people - It's not a pleasant thing. It's not a day in the park, but it's so lifesaving, and as we sadly know, younger and younger people are getting cancers younger. Women are getting breast cancer in their twenties and thirties. We don't know what we've done to the planet, what toxicities we've put into place to cause that change. But it's a real change. It's a fearsome change, and I want young women to be protected.

So the more I can come up with medical equipment and diagnostics that makes that possible, the prouder I am. I'm very pleased to have had a career that involves both the traditional healthcare environments where we put patients at ease in a pleasant setting. I worked on the first full body tomography system, and having visual arrays on the ceiling. Now, of course, we show cartoons to little children, and we wear headsets, so you hear music, and you don't have to hear the pounding of the machine, which frightens a lot of people. Open MRIs that take away from the tunnel syndrome fears.

All of this is design! And at the same time it's medicine, so it talks about the complimentary needs of science and social science. Creatives and engineers. And it's just as it should be. I tease about how it's Noah's Ark all over again. We need two of everything. And who do you leave out? That really throws the whole mix of the party if someone's been denied.

Laurel:  Design is often invisible. We rarely notice the objects or systems that support us. When design fails, when the door won't open the stairs, block the path, or the clothing doesn't fit our bodies, we suddenly see how much power it holds. Pattie Moore once spent four years walking through the world as an elder to prove a simple point:

Empathy isn't abstract. It can be designed. When it is, it has the power to change how we live, how we age, and how we care for one another.

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Iterations is created and produced by me, Laurel Hostak Jones. In partnership with Drexel University's Antoinette Westphall College of Media Arts & Design. Our supervising producer is Brandon Johnson. Production support is generously provided by the Drexel Department of Cinema and Television.