Designing for old age and being relevant
I read a piece in the Guardian this week about positive attitudes to ageing, citing a Yale study by Prof Becca Levy and Dr Martin Slade that followed more than 11,000 people aged 50 to 99 over 12 years. The headline finding stopped me in my tracks: 44% of participants actually improved on walking speed, memory and maths during the study, and those who started out with a positive attitude to ageing were significantly more likely to be in that improving group. As someone who designs discography art prints for a living, and who can't ever quite imagine retiring, financially or intellectually, this felt less like a wellness column and more like a directive.
I'm Mike Bell. I run mikebellmaps.com from East Sussex, designing illustrated maps that translate the discographies of artists such as The Beatles, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Nick Cave, and Johnny Marr into the visual grammar of the London Underground. Every map I make is the product of weeks of listening, cross-referencing session notes, working out which B-side belongs on which line, and second-guessing myself at 11 pm about a junction. The work doesn't get easier with age. It gets better.
The case for staying in the work
The Yale research aligns with something I already suspected from within my own studio: this kind of practice rewards accumulation. A discography art print isn't a quick brief. It's an act of pattern recognition across decades of someone else's creative life, and the more music I've absorbed, the more shows I've designed, the more cultural cross-currents I've lived through, the better I get at spotting the connection between, say, a Bowie B-side and a Marr guitar line that wouldn't exist without it. Twenty-five-year-old me couldn't have made the maps I'm making now. Sixty-five-year-old me, on current evidence, will still be making better ones.
Prof Srikanth, the geriatrician quoted in the Guardian piece, talks about the moment he turned 60 and someone asked when he was retiring, despite him being at the peak of a research career. He calls ageism "one of the last socially acceptable prejudices," and the article suggests employers and audiences alike routinely write off people who are, in measurable terms, still improving. I notice this in my own field too. Design culture worships the new graduate; cultural commentary often privileges the youngest voice in the room. But the people who buy my work, and there are a lot of them, tend to be the people who've been listening to a particular artist for thirty or forty years. They don't want a map made by someone who Googled the back catalogue last week.
What this means for the maps
A few things, practically:
I'm planning the studio in decades, not quarters. The catalogue I'm building, Beatles, Bowie, Floyd, ABBA, Bragg, Marr, Petty, Cave, OMD, Jethro Tull, plus the film maps for Bond, Blade Runner, Jaws and the rest, is meant to compound. Each new map sharpens my eye for the next one.
I'm leaning into the depth my audience already has. The people who own one of my prints aren't passive listeners. They notice when a connection is right and when it's lazy. The honest response is to keep deepening the research, not to simplify it.
And I'm taking the Levy finding seriously as a working principle. Prof Brian Draper, also quoted in the article, says the happiest stretch of life is later than most people assume, and that meaningful physical and cognitive decline often comes later still. If that's the trajectory available to me, then the question isn't whether to keep going, it's what I can build now that will still be worth making in twenty years.
Buying art for the long haul, too
There's something quietly relevant in this for the prints themselves. A discography art print isn't disposable décor. It's printed on archival Giclée stock to last a lifetime on a wall, and it's designed to keep rewarding attention, new connections appear the longer you live with it, just like a great album does. The work I make is meant to grow old well. So, with luck, am I.
If you've got an artist whose catalogue you've been carrying around for thirty years and want to see properly mapped, I'd love to hear from you. I'm not going anywhere.
