Generation What?

We regularly hear that the generation that someone’s in should drive the design of the space they’re in.  Tom Standage’s review of The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think by Bobby Duffy makes it clear that there’s probably a lot more discussion of generations going on among people working on design projects than there should be (“Does It Make Sense to Categorize People by Generation?” January 6, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/books/review/the-generation-myth-bobby-duffy.html).

In brief: “’A lot of what you’ve been told is generational, he [Duffy] writes ‘in fact isn’t.’  Three separate mechanisms cause such long-term changes, Duffy argues.  ‘Period effects’ are experiences that affect everyone, regardless of age, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the coronavirus pandemic.  ‘Life-cycle effects’ are changes that occur as people age, or as a result of major events such as leaving home, getting married or having children.  People tend to get heavier as they age, for example, regardless of which generation they belong to.  Finally, ‘cohort effects’ are the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors common to people of a particular generation.

The problem with purely generational framing, in short, is that it focuses entirely on cohort effects, and misses out on the other two-thirds of the picture.”