Design for Longevity — Lumière Living's Silver Play

A four-round, intermediate design-management and innovation simulation set inside Lumière Living, Lda., a Porto-based design house (founded 2009, EUR 38M revenue, 9% operating margin, 160 staff including a 22-person studio) that wins design awards but has never deliberately designed for older adults. The board has ring-fenced a EUR 4.0M launch budget to enter the longevity (silver) economy — but the first concept, a 'senior assistance lamp' with oversized buttons and an emergency button, scored disastrously: in a 90-person panel of 60–75-year-olds, 71% said it made them 'feel old' and would not buy it, with purchase intent at 8% versus a 25% hurdle. Playing the innovation lead, you have one 12-week launch cycle to redesign and commit. Round 1 — diagnose WHY a technically capable product was rejected, surfacing that this is a failure of design management and meaning (stigma), not engineering, and naming the design principles the lamp violated. Round 2 — choose the segment within a EUR 90M serviceable market that splits into identity-driven 'Active Agers' (60–70) and function-driven 'Supported Living' (75+), resisting the temptation to serve everyone. Round 3 — make the central design-investment decision (true inclusive/universal design at a EUR 1.1M premium vs. a cosmetic re-skin) and allocate the EUR 4.0M across the three value axes — design/engineering depth, societal value (co-design, accessibility, repairability/take-back), and business value (pricing, channel, launch marketing) — while keeping payback inside the CFO's 30-month hurdle. Round 4 — lock the configuration and present the go/no-go board case, defending how the line creates personal, business AND societal value at once and beats a Scandinavian 'dignified-ageing' rival on meaning, not features. The math rewards a meaning-led diagnosis, segment discipline, a genuine inclusive-design investment aligned to the chosen segment, abatement of stigma through co-design, and a credible payback — and measurably punishes the five classic errors: feature-fixing a meaning problem, serving everyone, re-skinning to save the EUR 1.1M, stripping social value to hit payback (or over-investing in impact with no viable P&L), and claiming 'design-led' when design never changed the product. Final KPIs track Desirability, Personal value, Societal value, and Payback (months, lower better), reconciled into a 3-axis longevity scorecard.