Redefining the Retirement Transition

International Design Awards (IDA) – Silver in Health & Life Science/Products for Social Impact Award Winner

Role: Service Designer and Researcher on 5-person team

Skills: Co-creation Facilitation, Multi-Stakeholder Perspective, Service Ecosystem Design, Systems Thinking, Platform Design, Wireframing

Problem

Retirement is typically framed as a financial milestone, not a personal transition—leaving many pre-retirees emotionally unprepared, and others in their network unsure how to help.

What I Did

I conducted multi-stakeholder research and systems thinking efforts to map the ecosystem and identify the root-cause of the problems and find the mutual job-to-be-done of employers. I designed key platform features that would solve these mutual problems.

Outcome

We designed a support platform for organizations to provide to their employees, including reflection tools, manager discussion guides, and peer connection tools. The final service aligned the needs of employers and employees, bridging emotional support with logistical structure.

Background

We began the project seeking to enable the exchange of an underutilized resource through service design. Originally, we identified that resource as the skills and expertise of U.S.-based retirees, who have stopped regular work, but still have valuable knowledge to share. Our original assumption was that retirees wanted to contribute to their community through teaching or mentoring younger generations, and we set out to develop a service platform that would enable this value exchange.

Identifying Key
Stakeholders via
Ecosystem Map

We developed an initial ecosystem map of retiree experience in the U.S., and identified our focus area as facilitating exchange between retirees and community members, where they had the potential to both teach their skills, and gain social connection.

From here we chose our stakeholder groups for primary research:

Primary Stakeholder: U.S. based retirees, aged 60-75, retired from full-time work
Secondary Stakeholder: Service recipients, graduate or undergraduate students, quickly approaching seeking out full-time work
Tertiary Stakeholder: Program Coordinators for retirees

Primary Research

We conducted research with the different groups...

Approach: Semi-structured interviews
Participants:

11 retirees
9 community members
1 program coordinator

Length: ~20 minutes per interview
Mode: In-person for retirees, and an online survey for community members.

...and we learned our assumption was wrong.

Redefining
Our Focus

Retirees didn't want to teach their skills during retirement, but they had struggled significantly with the emotional transition into retirement.

We heard about their fear entering retirement: a nagging thought that this was a final chapter of getting old and dying.

We reframed our challenge...
How might we emotionally support retirees in preparing for and navigating emotional anxiety and identity shifts during retirement?

Identifying the
Root-Cause of
the Problem

We mapped out the systemic contributors to this problem. This root-cause analysis informed both our opportunity areas and multi-stakeholder strategy.

Through our systemic analysis, we recognized that the retirement experience is shaped not only by employers and policy, but also by cultural narratives that treat retirement as an endpoint. We saw our opportunity: reframing the transition itself—roughly three years before to two years after retirement—as it's the most critical window for emotional support and identity reconstruction. Designing for this transitional period became our strategic leverage point.

Co-Creation Workshop

We now needed deeper insight into how retirees and stakeholders actually experience this transition. To gather this information efficiently we designed and facilitated a 90-minute co-creation workshop with near-retirees to deepen our understanding of how retirees experience the emotional transition into retirement and brainstorm ideas that support self-discovery, connection, and fulfillment.

Co-creation Blurred out participants.png

Revisiting the Ecosystem and Opportunity

In our conversations with retirees, we learned that how retirees left their company has a big impact, positively or negatively, on their emotional state entering retirement. While HR Managers, Direct Supervisors, and Peers play roles in offering planning, logistics, or emotional support, they often work independently. This leaves pre-retirees navigating a major life transition largely on their own, without clear guidance, emotional assurance, or consistent timing across systems.

Revisiting our ecosystem map, we identified an opportunity to reframe retirement as a shared responsibility.

From additional interviews with HR Managers and Direct Supervisors, we discovered their problems surrounding retirement. Their key jobs-to-be-done were providing a structured process to supervisors and planning for work coverage and knowledge transfer.

By addressing these jobs alongside preparing pre-retirees, we could successfully align organizational actors to support the pre-retiree’s emotional and logistical journey. We called this the "retirement bridge."

Final Concept

We designed Now and Next, a B2B service platform that helps organizations better support the emotional side of retirement while providing pre-retirees with pathways to reflect, plan, and seek inspiration about what retirement can look like.

The service platform included a three-phase support model, and features aligned to those phases.

Phase 1: Grounding

Goal: Help pre-retirees begin internal reflection on identity, emotions, and goals to prepare

Feature Highlight: Journal Prompts, designed to facilitate reflection gradually and a workbook that resurfaces those dreams into action pathways.

Phase 2: Transitioning

Goal: Equip supervisors to facilitate open, empathetic conversations and co-create personalized retirement plans with pre-retirees, ensuring logistical planning is standardized

Feature Highlight: Transition discussion guide for supervisors and pre-retirees

Phase 3: Maintain Connection and Legacy

Goal: Connect retirees with colleagues those who are “doing it well" to design meaningful post-retirement lives

Feature Highlight: Peer support and story wall, allowing retirees to find inspiration for their post-retirement life and connect with those with relevant experience

Impact

Finally, we defined the key strategic value-adds of the service for both of our key actors, as well as the KPIs that could be used to ensure mutual value was achieved.

Reflections

This project showed me the power of shifting from individual-focused design to ecosystem thinking. When you identify true mutual problems, you provide incentives to each actor to use a system, making it more likely to succeed. The reason many services fail is because only one user group's problems have been thoroughly solved by a solution, and a key strength of our service was that it developed logistical planning workflows for the employer side, a current gap in the retirement process, that were enabled through supporting pre-retiree reflection and planning to ease their emotional transition.