Blazing a Better Path to Old Age : Practical View: Products made only for the young and able irritate Patricia Moore. Her “universal” designs embrace the needs of all people.

PHOENIX —  Patricia Moore twirls her carousel of color slides vigorously, searching for the one that illustrates her point. It’s a sign she photographed at the Smithsonian Institution. It says: “Handicapped Ramp.”

“I went up to the guard and asked if he could tell me where to find the ‘regular’ ramp,” she says. “Speak English--why couldn’t the sign just say ‘ramp?’ ”

Moore is incensed by the labels that set people apart: disabled, handicapped, senior, muppie, geriatric, oldster.

Such designations, she says, suggest that certain groups of people are inadequate because they need special equipment or services to function in society.

The reality, says industrial designer-consumer advocate Moore, is they are the victims of poor design--a world whose products and residences and workplaces were created with only the healthy, agile consumer in mind. She dismisses this approach as “Darwinian.”

“We disable people,” Moore, 40, tells audiences of designers and architects and engineers and planners as she crisscrosses the country beating the drums for a wholesale redesign of our structural environment.

Moore looks at a typical kitchen and finds 50 ways to improve it: Why not have pull-out shelves for bulky appliances like blenders and food processors? Why not adjustable sinks and countertops? What about a hands-free speaker phone or voice-activated light switches?

Moore has designed such products as pill bottles with a built-in timer in the twist top, “Good Grip” kitchen utensils for people with diminished hand strength and a snap-top lid for a Tide box.

“It is not enough to assume that if well-bodied individuals can use a certain piece of equipment, then it is properly designed,” she says. “If an automated-teller machine can’t be reached by a wheelchair user, then that person has been unjustly limited.”

There is no reason, she says, to have two sets of products--one for the fit and agile and a second for the elderly or physically challenged.

Moore is a leading advocate for “universal design,” in which products embrace “the needs of all consumers.”

“Someone with arthritis or low vision, a latchkey kid or your grandmother, should be able to maintain themselves safely in their own home.”

It’s a simple message, but one not everybody is eager to hear.

“By the time I was 26 and working as a product designer in New York, I was getting a real clarity that no one was going to listen to me.”

Moore persisted. Over a three-year period, from 1979 to 1982, she disguised herself as a woman in her 80s, then took on such everyday tasks as shopping. The experience of being an old person in a youth-oriented society has shaped her work since.

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It was by chance that Moore struck up a conversation with NBC makeup designer Barbara Kelly at a party in 1979. Their instant rapport was one of those “sisters separated at birth things,” recalls Moore. When Kelly described her work, which included creating the look of the Coneheads on “Saturday Night Live,” Moore, on a whim, requested to be made up like an old woman.

“I’d been invited to an architectural conference in Columbus, Ohio, on nursing homes for the elderly,” she says. “I thought it might be interesting to attend as an elder.”

Kelly used body wraps to keep Moore slightly hunched, balsa knee splints to stiffen her walk, ear plugs, Vaseline on her eyelashes to blur her sight, taped-down thumbs under cotton gloves to simulate arthritis. Kelly also designed a set of lightweight prosthetic pieces to provide natural-looking wrinkles and folds under latex skin.

The disguise changed Moore’s relationship with the world. The first thing she learned, as the only old person at the conference, was that she didn’t exist. “Everybody was getting acquainted, but nobody wanted to talk to me,” she says. “It was like a stigma.”

Moore had studied gerontology, had read about older people being disregarded. Now she was living it. “I just became part of the wallpaper,” she recalls.

She put on her act not only in New York but also on business trips, eventually covering 14 states. “I got to the point where I could pull it together when I had to run to this meeting or that.”

Her octogenarians ranged from bag ladies to affluent matrons who struck up park-bench conversations, tried to cross streets before lights changed and fumbled with change in the supermarket checkout line while people behind her muttered in irritation. Airports became a physical nightmare with their hordes of rushing travelers and slick tile floors. In stores, she was often shortchanged by “people who thought I was too ditzy to notice.”

People were more likely to jockey ahead of Moore, as an old woman, in the checkout line, and she found herself accepting it. She began to buy into the fact that, as a “little old lady,” she was unimportant, an attitude psychologists call “identification with the aggressor.”

Her experiences are chronicled in her book, “Disguised: A True Story,” published in 1985 by Word Books and used as a text by a number of nursing schools and gerontology programs.

Moore says she was startled by “just how angry the world is at seeing elders as a bother,” but she found elders, for the most part, to be neither pessimistic nor self-pitying.

“I was forcibly struck with the bright and optimistic tenor of the talk,” she writes. “I heard older people talk proudly of children and grandchildren, express delighted amazement at the latest developments in science and technology or share an eagerness to leave something behind for their families.”

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Moore dropped the disguise when the psychological line between her personas began to blur; she feared her role-playing might be taking over her life. She started her own design firm and threw herself full-tilt into lobbying for universal design.

“I’ve been going into boardrooms and talking about universal design until I am blue in the face,” she says. But until recently she has been a lonely voice.

Ironically, her cause has been joined by another labeled group, the baby boomers, now reaching middle age and dealing with elderly parents. “We used to say don’t trust anybody over 30,” says New York designer Tucker Viemeister.

“All of a sudden we’re past 40.”

Universal design is fast becoming a hot trend in the marketplace, increasingly displayed and discussed at the major national product shows. Moore is increasingly saluted as being a forerunner in the movement.

“She’s always been one of the cutting-edge people,” says Viemeister, who has known her since college.

Despite her sunny disposition, Moore can be very tough. As the only woman graduating in industrial design in 1974 from the prestigious Rochester Institute of Technology, she got involved in redesigning an inner-city housing project.

After corporate experience with design pioneer Raymond Loewy’s firm in Manhattan, she went back to school for degrees in bio-mechanics, psychology and social gerontology. “The people who designed the environment, and the people who designed the products to put in the environment weren’t even talking to each other,” she says.

Paul Rook, professor of industrial design at the Seattle Art Institute, has worked with Moore since 1983.

“She has disturbed a lot of comfort zones in her profession by knocking on doors and saying we are not addressing real human needs,” he says. “It was a risk to go out, as she did, to make herself up, tape herself up, so she couldn’t move very well and to literally live as an elderly person. That can be terrifying.”

She moved west after she met David Guynes on a 1989 visit to Phoenix, where they were members of a television panel on nursing homes. Guynes, also a designing pioneer, develops rehabilitation centers for health-care facilities.

“We had the same fire in the belly,” Moore says.

They were married the following year and merged their companies into Guynes Design Inc., which is housed in a Spanish mission-style adobe complex in a downtown desert bower of graceful mesquite trees and wildflowers. Moore heads projects and development, in addition to maintaining a lecture and consulting schedule.

“It was her intensity that attracted me,” says Guynes. “We both look at the world in a holistic way.”

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“Shut your eyes,” Moore says she tells audiences of architects, “and imagine you have just pulled your car into your driveway and are going into the house. Only you are in a wheelchair. Start dissecting your whole day from a seated position. What would you have trouble with?”

Getting into the house, for starters. And then the doors, the lights, the closets, the kitchen. “We are not prepared to age in place in our homes because our homes will not be accessible,” she says. “Manufacturers are just starting to wake up to the fact that by the year 2030, one out of five people will be over 65.”

Back in her sunny Phoenix office, she acknowledges a sense of frustration that universal design, although getting headlines now, is not a widespread cause in the design world. “I feel the clock is ticking very quickly for a huge generation of baby boomers who are going to be dramatically surprised by what will not be in place for them,” she says.

The Helpful House

“The business of making people able,” says Patricia Moore, is to design houses that will meet the needs of all consumers. What does this mean? From a Gallup poll that identified problem areas for people with varying levels of strength and dexterity, Moore offers this checklist for architects, planners and product designers.

A universally designed house would help its occupants:

* Open medicine packages.

* Read product labels.

* Reach high things.

* Vacuum or dust.

* Go up and down stairs.

* Clean bathtubs and sinks.

* Wash and wax floors.

* Carry purchases.

* Use tools.

* Be alone (means of notifying someone if anything happens).

* Use the shower or bathtub.

* Move around the house without slipping or falling.