We've announced eight Finalist teams for our 2018-19 Design Challenge “Contributing at Every Age: Designing for Intergenerational Impact.” 

Now in its sixth year, the Challenge’s primary goal is to encourage a new generation of designers to become engaged in finding creative solutions that support well-being across the life span. The Challenge is open to student submissions from any accredited university worldwide. This year’s competition attracted 97 submissions from teams representing 24 countries across the globe.

Why does happiness get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump when you’re successful? Where does this malaise come from? And, most importantly, will it ever end?

Drawing on cutting-edge research, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions. He shows that from our 20s into our 40s, happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory, a “happiness curve,” declining from the optimism of youth into what’s often a long, low slump in middle age, before starting to rise again in our 50s.

Please join us for this talk on February 25th at Stanford.

Strategies for turning back the aging clock have moved from the realm of science fiction to the lab in recent years. As these approaches become closer to reality, the first “target” will not likely be extension of life, but rather attacking age-related chronic diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, frailty, and heart disease. Rather than restricting ourselves to treating the symptoms of these maladies, we may be able to target reversal of the aging process at the cellular level, delaying the onset or reversing symptoms by making the affected cells “younger.”