EngAGE Stories

It was thirty years ago on August 30th that Guion “Guy” Bluford, now 70, became the first African-America in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger. “Bluford was part of NASA’s barrier-breaking 1978 class of astronauts. Of the 35 spaceflyers selected, three were African-Americans, and six were women, including Sally Ride. . . . ‘Guy was the first person of color to fly and that was absolutely incredible, but it was would have been empty had he been the first and only,’ added [NASA chief Charles] Bolden, who became the space agency’s first black administrator in 2009 and is also a veteran of four space shuttle flights.” Read more and see a video on the NASA website.

On Monday September 16, our friends at ChangingAging are supporting the 3rd annual Seattle Design Festival where Kavan Peterson, editor at www.ChangingAging.org, will be moderating a panel discussion entitled, “Enlivening Design For Aging,” on the role of design in enabling or compromising our ability to thrive across the lifespan.

Kavan says, “We’re taking a big picture approach and tackling diverse design issues ranging from technology, products and services to re-imagining environments and communities for aging to re-designing the human lifespan.” Read more here and take a look at the video below of Craig Ferguson explaining “why everything sucks.”

As Kavan points out, “Ferguson deftly and succinctly skewers our culture for its obsession with youth and what I’d call inanity — stupidity in the context of being silly and irrelevant. The way our culture views and treats age is silly and irrelevant. And in turn the way we design, market and sell products and content is silly and irrelevant.”

From HuffPo Black Voices:

Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges, who as a 6-year-old helped end public school segregation in the South, was reunited Thursday with one of the federal marshals who had escorted her past angry crowds so she could attend a previously all-white school.

Bridges, who in 1960 became the first black child to attend an all-white school in New Orleans, met with Charles Burks at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which was filming the pair for its permanent exhibit called “The Power of Children.” Burks, now 91, is the only one of the four marshals who escorted Bridges to and from school who is still alive.

“Thank you Charlie for doing what was right at a time when it might not have been the easiest thing to do,” she told Burks.

See photos, including their reunion, and read more here.