Last week I went to the launch of the Living with Dementia: Can Design Make a Difference, a research study conducted by the Design Research Centre at Kingston University. The study was looking at the opportunities to use design in reshaping and reinventing care homes for people with dementia, their families and care home staff. It concluded with a series of design principles which will help practitioners in the future create better spaces for people living with dementia. This will be published in May.
The study was rigorous, thorough and timely, but while it recognised the value of design in the creation of physical indoor and outdoor space, I feel strongly that design processes and design thinking should also be used to better involve people with dementia in improvement and change.
It doesn’t seem like we are going far enough by simply observing and interpreting behaviours and then defining solutions, we need to be designing tools and ways in which people with dementia are involved in the design, creation and co-production of their own spaces. It may not always be easy to facilitate this involvement, but we have a responsibility to try in new and innovative ways. People living with the dementia are the experts, not us.
The article above was published in this weeks Design Week.