LAUGH: Designing to enhance positive emotion for people living with dementia

Dementia comprises a number of degenerative neurological diseases. It is a complex condition and each person’s experience and symptoms are different. There is a growing awareness of the need for well-designed products and services to assist with dementia care and to enhance wellbeing. This paper presents research investigating the design of playful objects for people with late stage dementia. The investigation described is a preliminary stage in the LAUGH (Ludic Artefacts Using Gesture and Haptics) project; an AHRC funded international, interdisciplinary design research project. People living with dementia, informal and professional carers, health professionals, art therapists, charity representatives, arts practitioners and designers are informing the research through a series of expert group participatory workshops and case study interviews. Observation, discussion, video, photography and investigation. Findings presented in this paper focus on the importance of emotional memory and emotional expression in the care of people with late stage dementia; the value of sensory triggers and props to stimulate emotional remembering; and the importance of designing to promote high quality social connections

In the moment: designing for late stage dementia

This paper presents international multidisciplinary design research to support the wellbeing of people living with dementia. The LAUGH project aims to develop playful artefacts that will contribute to non-pharmacological personalised approaches to caring for people living with late stage dementia in residential care. This paper presents the context for this research and explains the initial stages of the work currently in progress. An inclusive participatory methodology is described in which key experts including: health professionals, technologists, materials scientists and carers of people living with dementia are informing the development of design concepts. A positive design approach in which designing for pleasure, personal significance and virtue underpin the work. The initial stages of the research have identified the significance of: playfulness, sensory stimulation, hand use and emotional memory. This paper contends that designs should aim to promote ‘in the moment’ living in order to support subjective wellbeing of people living with late stage dementia

Designing for wellbeing in late stage dementia

This paper presents research that is developing new ways of supporting the wellbeing of people with late stage dementia through the development of playful objects. The LAUGH project is an international AHRC funded design research project that is using qualitative and participatory approaches to inform innovative concepts for new playful artefacts to stimulate fun, joy and in the moment pleasure for people living with dementia. The research is partnered by Gwalia Cyf and supported by Age Cymru and Alzheimer’s Society, including people living with dementia from their Service User Review Panels (SURP). Data presented is informed by three pre-design development workshops in which a multidisciplinary group of experts in the fields of dementia care and design have contributed their professional experience. This paper specifically focuses on data from the third of these workshops exploring procedural memory in relation to hand-use and craft making. This paper contends that hand-use, gesture and haptic sensibilities can provide access to procedural and emotional memories, which are retained even into the late stages of the disease. Craft and making activities learned in earlier life, provide rhythmic patterns of hand activity that can enhance wellbeing by supporting in the moment sensory experience, competency and reaffirmation of personhood. Playful activities provide a person with dementia freedom to explore, learn and have positive experiences even when cognitive function and memory recall is severely impaired. Future planned workshops will see the iterative development of prototype designs and their evaluation in ‘live labs’ with people living with late stage dementia

Design for dementia: Making spaces for uncertainty

This paper presents research undertaken as part of the LAUGH project to explore design processes and design of hand held playful objects for people living with advanced dementia. A series of six co-design workshops were carried out with experts in relationto dementia and design. This paper reports on a workshop with designers that enabled them to draw on their experience and training in design, provided creative opportunities to reflect on their personal values, and challenged preconceptions about designing for dementia care

The Lancaster Care Charter

In the fall of 1991 the Munich Design Charter was published in Design Issues. This charter was written as a design-led “call to arms” on the future nations and boundaries of Europe. The signatories of the Munich Design Charter saw the problem of Europe, at that time, as fundamentally a problem of form that should draw on the creativity and expertise of design. Likewise, the Does Design Care…? workshop held at Imagination, Lancaster University in the autumn of 2017 brought together a multidisciplinary group of people from 16 nations across 5 continents, who, at a critical moment in design discourse saw a problem with the future of Care. The Lancaster Care Charter has been written in response to the vital question “Does Design Care…?” and via a series of conversations, stimulated by a range of presentations that explored a range of provocations, insights, and more questions, provides answers for the contemporary context of Care. With nation and boundary now erased by the flow of Capital the Charter aims to address the complex and urgent challenges for Care as both the future possible and the responsibility of design. The Lancaster Care Charter presents a collective vision and sets out new pragmatic encounters for the design of Care and the care of Design

Chance Memories: Supporting involuntary reminiscence by design

People give huge importance to preserving their memories as a way of understanding who they are and what they are about. Current memory support systems, however, favour people self-prescribing time and space to collect, store and maintain explicit memory triggers (e.g. photographs, videos, memorabilia). Finding time to access such systems and their potential triggers to engage in reminiscence is a process requiring great effort, organisation and dedication. This thesis builds on the view that it is not the supports that contain the memory but people to explore new systems that hint at memories rather than serving as repositories. This offers great scope for designers, as systems no longer have to be designed around personal memory evidence alleviating the need for people to contribute, update and retrieve personal content. To achieve this, understanding around involuntary memory provides inspiration towards designing support and is considered through more specific questions: . What are current methods for capturing, archiving and accessing memory triggers? . Through understanding the nature of memory, how can design support unexpected remembering? . How might designed support for unexpected remembering enhance reminiscing experiences? The methodology is an iterative evaluation of current practices, analysis, proposals and recommendations, with three methods used throughout. First, I review literature around the nature of memory and exploring the current approaches for designing reminiscence support as a foundation for new approaches. Second, I report empirical studies to collect anecdotal evidence of unexpected remembering. Finally, I develop proposals and recommendations that reflect on the findings of the literature review and explorations showing how design can extend and enhance current experiences of unexpected remembering. Overall, this thesis develops a new approach to designing memory support. As an alternative to prescribing explicit, intense and proactive memory recall instalments, this research presents design recommendations that are sympathetic to how people naturally remember and their need for spontaneous, lightweight memory recall

Spazi monastici, spazi di donne

In questo saggio si sono prese in esame le modalità con le quali le donne occuparono lo spazio monastico in particolare all’interno e all’esterno dell’abbazia femminile di San Lorenzo di Venezia. Si è tracciato un percorso tra abitatrici, semi-religiose, converse che, in luoghi e tempi diversi, abitarono dentro al cenobio ma in luoghi separati dalle monache. Dalla metà del Trecento, quando le autorità ecclesiastiche veneziane, e non solo, presero una serie di provvedimenti che limitavano i contatti tra monache e laici, apparvero ai margini del cenobio le affittuarie, donne a loro volta legate in vario modo al monastero. Infine si è notato che l’utilizzo dallo spazio monastico non ebbe sempre una funzione religiosa o di protezione, come per le converse e le abitatrici, bensì come spazio pubblico nel quale rinchiudere mogli e nipoti di traditori di Venezia.In this paper, it is examined the modalities of women occupation of monastic space, inside and outside San Lorenzo nunnery. It is described a path through laywomen, conversae, quasi-religious women who lived inside the monastery but not necessarily in same spaces of nuns. From the second half of XIV century, when venetian ecclesiastical authorities took several measures to restrict contacts between nuns and not professed women, appeared a great number of women, bounded in different way to the monastery, who decided to live near San Lorenzo. It is noticed that monastic space didn’t have only a religious or protection function, but sometimes it became a public space in order to imprison traitors of Venice

Open Doors: designing playful objects for dementia

This design-based submission comprises a prototype design for a playful object for use in dementia care and the ‘Open Doors’ documentary video that explains the underpinning research collaboration. LUMA is a hand-held playful object, designed for people living with advanced dementia, and is one of six design outputs from the recently completed AHRC-funded LAUGH project. This qualitative design research used participatory and co-design methods and Compassionate Design methodology to investigate how playful objects can be designed to support the wellbeing of people living with advanced dementia. One of the major challenges facing society is how to provide appropriate care for the increasing numbers of people living with dementia and to ensure that they are able to live well, right until the end of their lives. The aim of the research was to investigate ways to stimulate, engage and bring pleasure to people living with advanced dementia through the creation of simple hand-held devices. LUMA is an object that was developed in collaboration with members of the Men’s Shed in Tondu. The accompanying ‘Open Doors’ film explains how the LAUGH design team exchanged their digital fabrication expertise with members of the Men’s Shed who were skilled in hand crafting wooden objects. The creative collaboration resulted in LUMA, a hand-held interactive object that brings the outside experience of nature inside through touch, light and sound

Compassionate design for dementia care

One of the most pressing challenges facing designers today is how to create appropriate, useful and safe designs for people living with advanced dementia. Dementia is a complex disease that presents and progresses differently for each individual. This paper contends that co-design with experts, including people living with dementia and their carers, is essential to inform design. Compassionate Design principles are useful to guide the creative process and ensure that concepts are developed that maintain the dignity, personhood and wellbeing of the person living with dementia. The key themes of Compassionate Design are presented through examples of designs for playful objects created as part of the LAUGH design for dementia research. A qualitative participatory co-design research methodology is described along with findings informed by a Live Lab evaluation of the objects with people living with advanced dementia living in residential care