Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning

7. Senior Moments

138 Seven Senior Moments R Trying to do simple tasks in the aging simulation suit had me in a frustrated sweat after only a couple of minutes. Velcro athletic pads tightly bound my wrists, elbows, ankles, and knees, and padded gloves made my fingers nearly immobile. Neck constraints prohibited me from easily turning my head to look around me, but, even so, I couldn’t see more than a pinprick of vision in each eye as my entire periphery was darkened to a black emptiness by special glasses. A tight vest restricted my breathing and sandbags stitched into the fabric of the blue coveralls weighed down my upper arms and elbows and my lower and middle back. My spine struggled against the weight of my torso, which was kept at a permanent, hunched angle by short vinyl straps connecting my shoulders and knees. With these restrictions on my breathing and mobility, and the difficult procedures involved in figuring out where exactly my body was in relation to my chair, even sitting and standing wore me out. Was this was what it felt like to be old, I wondered? Would this help me better judge my parents’ability to drive in a few years or to be more sensitive to what my mother-­ in-­ law is going through with the onset of macular degeneration ? Is this, furthermore, how I could expect my own body functions to betray me in a few more years? As I removed the layers of the “old suit,” and with it the layers of difficulty, I at the very least became hyperaware of how I take mobility and physical health for granted. These are the kinds of thoughts one is intended to have in workshops designed by consultants from the Xtreme Aging program of the Macklin Intergenerational Institute, which is working to increase age awareness and acceptance in the home, the workplace, and in the world around us. Hundreds of participants have done Xtreme Aging empathy training, from nursing home staff, car insurance-­ companies and their clients, and bankers seeking ways to be more sensitive to their clienteles to physicians, librarians, and Senior Moments • 139 packaging designers.I got the chance to try out Xtreme Aging when I visited the Macklin offices in Findlay,Ohio,in 2011.“Aging happens over a lifetime,” says Dr. Vicki Rosebrook, who heads the program and founded it in 2003. “We age people in five minutes.”1 Participants in Xtreme Aging exercises are physically manipulated to simulate the discomforts and complications of old age and are subjected to scenarios where they play the part of aging adults, performing tasks such as counting out change from a tiny coin purse or dialing a cell phone,in order to build deeper awareness of and sensitivity to what their older clients, patients, or family members go through. Sensitivity training like that in the Xtreme Aging workshops can be found in programs across the country and has become a staple in college courses ranging from nursing to sociology. John Leland of the New York Times reports, “As the population in the developing world ages, simulation programs like Xtreme Aging have become a regular part of many nursing or medical school curriculums , and have crept into the corporate world, where knowing what it is like to be elderly increasingly means better understanding one’s customers or even employees.”2 The AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is, by my reckoning, the best funded and most high-­ tech of the aging simulation programs currently available.The university’s age suit,Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES), with its crash helmet, futuristic yellow goggles, foam boots, and network of rubber straps crisscrossing the whole thing, was featured in 2011 in the business section of the New York Times, which reports that firms from potato chip manufacturers to the Ford Motor Company are looking for creative ways to anticipate what older Americans will want in their products in order to cash in on the upcoming “age explosion.”3 (By 2050 the United Nations estimates that the worldwide population of people aged sixty-­ five and older will rise to 1.5 billion from 523 million in 2010, and that the average life expectancy in developed countries will reach one hundred years for women and the mid-­ nineties for men).4 Eric Dishman, the global director of health innovation at the Intel Corporation told Natasha Singer of the Times, “There is an enormous market opportunity to deliver technology and services...