Now and Next: Redefining Retirement
Now and Next is a service designed to help employees and organizations navigate the transition into retirement with clarity, structure, and care—transforming it from an endpoint into a meaningful next chapter.
CLIENT
For companies and organizations supporting employee retirement transitions
DURATION
January-March 2025
ROLE
Service Designer, Researcher, Project Manager
IMPACT AREA
Supporting Holistic Retirement Transitions in the Workplace
Retirement is one of the most significant transitions in a person’s life, yet it is often reduced to a checklist. Most organizations focus on logistics—benefits, timelines, and offboarding—while overlooking the emotional and social impact of leaving a long-held role.
As a result, many retirees experience: loss of identity and purpose, reduced sense of connection, and uncertainty about what comes next
Despite this, structured support for the human side of retirement remains limited.
Problem Statement
The current transition into retirement neglects retirees’ emotional needs to reconstruct identity and gain recognition for the value of their life-long contributions and post-retirement impact.
Key Insight
The retirees face a 40% higher risk of depression, mainly fearing loss of sharpness and identity. However, they seek purposeful, flexible activities that offer fulfillment over their careers.
Now and Next is a digital dashboard that helps professionals and supervisors navigate retirement transitions together.
The platform creates structured communication and reflection tools while connecting those transitioning with people who have successfully made the change. It provides peer mentorship, support, and inspiring stories to guide both employees and managers through this important life change.
We began the project exploring how retirees could continue contributing their knowledge after leaving the workforce.
Our initial assumption was that retirees wanted to stay active by sharing their expertise—through teaching, mentoring, or community engagement. But early research revealed a different reality.
We conducted interviews with retirees, near-retirees, and supporting stakeholders to understand how people actually experience retirement.
Across conversations, a pattern emerged: retirement wasn’t just about what people would do next—it was about how they felt leaving behind who they were.
Many described: uncertainty about identity, fear of losing purpose, and a lack of guidance during the transition. This shifted our focus from activity to emotion.
Identifying the System
We mapped the broader ecosystem to understand how different actors shape the retirement experience. While multiple stakeholders were involved—HR, managers, peers—they operated independently, without a shared structure to support the transition. This left pre-retirees navigating the experience largely on their own.
Root Cause Analysis
To better understand the problem, we analyzed the systemic forces shaping retirement.
We found that the issue was not just operational but also emotional. We found that for most, work is closely tied to identity and retirement is framed as an endpoint. Currently, support systems focus on logistics and not emotional transition.
At the same time, conversations about retirement often happen too late—leaving little time for reflection or preparation.
This revealed a key opportunity: to reframe retirement as a shared, ongoing transition—supported across time and not just at the point of exit.
Co-Creation Workshop
To deepen our understanding, we facilitated a co-creation workshop with near-retirees. Participants explored their fears, needs, and aspirations for retirement, and helped us imagine what meaningful support could look like for them.
We learned that people needed:
space to reflect
guidance without pressure
connection with others who had gone through it
Revisiting the Ecosystem
With these insights, we returned to our ecosystem map with a new perspective.
Instead of focusing only on retirees, we identified an opportunity to align multiple actors—employees, managers, HR, and peers—around a shared transition experience.
This shifted our approach from solving for individuals to designing for a system. We called this the retirement bridge—a model that connects emotional and logistical support across stakeholders.
Understanding the Experience
To translate these insights into design opportunities, we mapped the future-state end-to-end experience of transitioning into retirement. While logistical processes were often clear, the emotional journey was fragmented and unsupported.
Key moments of tension included:
uncertainty leading up to retirement
lack of structured conversations
loss of connection after leaving work
This made visible where support was missing—and where intervention could create the most impact.
Final Concept
We designed Now and Next, a B2B service platformm, that helps organizations better support the emotional and practical transition into retirement.
Instead of treating retirement as a single event, the service supports it as an ongoing journey—starting before an employee’s final day and continuing into post-retirement life.
By aligning employees, managers, and organizations through a shared structure, the service enables more meaningful, supported transitions.
A Three-Phase Support Model
The service is structured around three key phases:
Phase 1: Grounding
GOAL
Help pre-retirees begin internal reflection on their identity, emotions, and goals to prepare emotionally and mentally for retirement.
OPPORTUNITIES
Offer guided reflection tools or conversation prompts tailored to retirement planning.
Create low-stakes group conversations or storytelling sessions for those considering retirement.
Normalize emotional check-ins as part of HR or manager-led retirement planning.
Phase 2: Transitioning
GOAL
Equip supervisors to facilitate open, empathetic conversations and co-create personalized retirement plans with pre-retirees, improving transition support.
OPPORTUNITIES
Develop simple tools and guides to help supervisors start conversations around retirement earlier.
Share conversation templates, prompts, and sensitivity training.
Highlight testimonials of meaningful retirement transitions within the organization.Visual timeline tracking where pre-retirees are in their journey, completed prompts, actions, and discussions to keep the process organized and low-pressure.
Phase 3: Maintain Connection and Legacy
GOAL
Support retirees in envisioning and designing meaningful post-retirement lives, fostering a sense of ongoing contribution and connection.
OPPORTUNITIES
Offer legacy interviews or “retirement retrospectives” to capture learnings and contributions.
Create light-touch pathways for ongoing involvement—mentoring, storytelling, volunteering, peer support.
Rethink farewell rituals to focus not just on celebration, but on reflection and impact.
Now and Next delivers value by aligning employee experience with organizational outcomes, turning retirement from a fragmented process into a structured, measurable transition.
