The Playful Paradigm

1. The Intergenerational Moment.

If there was a single theme that I heard across all five countries that I visited, it was the importance that each of those societies attach to fostering intergenerational activities and cooperation. Intergenerational relationships are perceived as organizing principles of civil society, meaning intergenerational activities show up in all sorts of interesting places: in Singapore, for instance, in housing policy and housing design; in Bergamo, Italy, in the reshaping of senior centers to “Centers for All Ages”.

In Ourense, Spain, a mid-sized town in northwest Spain, I visited the Ourense Intergenerational Center, a combined senior and early education center funded in part by the Amancio Ortega Foundation and now run by the province of Galicia. What makes this facility stand out, among the many that I saw, was the care taken to design an attractive space for both seniors and toddlers and to create easy opportunities for interaction and support. The two facilities share a common playground and garden, and there are both natural and planned opportunities for generational interaction. The model has proven sufficiently successful—so much so that managers of the senior center are beginning to create projects with other intergenerational audiences, including young people with Down Syndrome and youthful offenders.

2. The Playful Paradigm.

In the northeast corner of Italy, I visited Udine, a mid-size city that has built entire decade-long programs that count on the attractiveness of games to bring people together for social connection and healthy aging. It’s called the Playful Paradigm, and it puts games and play at the center of a wide variety of engagement and healthy living activities. The municipal toy libraries (both the fixed location and the mobile van) are full of games for young and old; the parks are dotted with games to encourage active participation; World Game Day and Pi Day are major pillars of the annual civic calendar; and even the dementia prevention programs are built around bringing people out of their homes to play mind games. It’s a creative approach to active engaging and civic engagement and the Udine approach is now followed by a handful of cities across Europe.

Where does an idea for something like the Playful Paradigm come from? I asked around, but no one had answer, until I met Furio Honsell, the mayor of Udine from 2008 to 2018, and the person credited with launching the project. Honsell, a mathematician and former rector of the University of Udine, showed up to our meeting clutching his own personal bag of games. With great enthusiasm, he showed off his favorites, including games dating back to the Middle Ages, and then he shared his personal strategy for winning at Wordle, which he plays every day in four different languages.

Even I could see that it was Honsell’s passion for gaming that inspired the Playful Paradigm. He believed that his fellow citizens of Udine would get as much joy from games as he does, and built the project in his likeness. More than a decade on, the Playful Paradigm is going strong and makes a strong case that Honsell was right about the social connection value of games.

3. Back to Japan.

I only visited five countries (if you don’t count Andorra and really who does?), so to keep this at a multiple of three, let’s return to Japan.

It’s only fair that Japan gets double billing as it is the world’s oldest country, both by life expectancy and by median age. It is also the country which has the largest cohort of older workers. In 2023, over 25% of people over the age of 65 were still working in Japan, with half of the people in the age group 65-69 still active, and one-third of the people between the ages of 70-74 still employed. The growth of older workers has something to do with economics of course, but mostly it is about changing perceptions of age and work: 40% of the people between 65 -75 do not consider themselves “older people” and 70% of Japanese over the age of 65 say they want to continue to work.

That change of attitude is fueled in part by strategic changes in how people work later in life. Japan has been aggressive in deploying many tools to support older workers: flex time, part time work, job sharing, phased retirement and so forth. Japan is also a trailblazer in harnessing technologies that support older workers. In Tokyo, I visited with Hiroshi Kobayashi, a professor at the Tokyo University of Science and the inventor of the Muscle Suit, an exoskeleton suit that uses air pressure to help workers more easily lift and carry heavy objects. I tried it, and it works. Though it is of limited utility for me, whose heaviest effort is lifting the lid of my laptop, it has clear value both for older workers and for younger workers who are hoping to protect and extend the life of their bodies.

Much of the discussion around older workers is whether to keep working or not, but the experience of Japan clearly shows that how they will work is of at least equal importance.