Redesign Dementia - Reframing Care at Home
How can we disseminate knowledge about – and not pathologise – dementia-friendly home design to enable people with dementia to live more independently at home?
In aging societies, the number of people with dementia (PWD) is growing. But there is still a lack of awareness of the disabling influence of the design of our environment and the objects within it. Focusing on private living environments, I used ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews and cultural probes to establish that due to social stigma cognitive accessibility (i.e. signage) is rarely used by caregivers or PWD as an enabling strategy, even in their own homes. There is great potential for designers to work with PWD to develop and disseminate cognitive accessibility design strategies to offer PWD more autonomy in their own homes and assist caregivers.
Redesign Dementia presents strategies for dementia-friendly design and raises awareness about dementia symptoms by means of a virtual experience. In order to reframe the disease and counteract stigmatisation, care is taken to present the topic without pathologising it. The highly individual symptomatology of dementia requires flexible and creative approaches, so the information provided is also intended to inspire new ideas.
