Empowering People Living with Dementia Through Designing

The ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) of dementia is a leading global healthcare concern. The prevalence of diagnosis is increasing significantly and correlats with longer life expectancy (Spijker and Macinnes, 2013). In the UK has an estimated 850,000 people living with dementia (PLWD). For whom the greatest burden of care is placed on loved ones and privately funded approaches (Alzheimer Society, 2015). The result can be hugely challenging for the person diagnosed with dementia and their loved ones, leading to further issues of ill-health (Marriot, 2009). The Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia (2012) has encouraged development of multi-faceted responses and interventions to deliver improvements in care and research. As a result, designers have been encouraged to become skilled specialists engaged in thinking differently around dementia and the associated problems. This research explores co-design (Scrivener, 2005) with people living with dementia in order to understand their complex problems, and to propose and to shape interventions or solutions that can alleviate pressures which include, social isolation, stress, infantilisation and a sense of hopelessness (Kitwood, 1990). Through fifteen projects achieved within series of co-design workshops, the research explores empowerment of PLWD through their own advocacy. The research shares how co-design can be an enduring process that stimulates new behaviours and memories whilst building resilience and keeping people active in society. Which, ultimately asks questions as to how common practices of co-design can change hierarchy and ownership in order to transform practices of design done ‘to’or ‘for’ PLWD to integrated projects ‘with’ and ‘by’ them. The results propose that people living with dementia can maintain highly significant efficacy in shaping lived experiences, making decisions, building relationships, and producing impactful designs. The resultant projects and proceses supports their right to make decisions and to develop their own prowess through meaningful, deeply involved, and astutely delivered designs

Photography At Edinburgh Napier University : A Retrospective 2012.

Edinburgh Napier University is delighted to host a reunion of alumni, to celebrate more than 35 years of its Photography and Film programmes.Photography has a long history at Edinburgh Napier that parallels the development and progress of the institution. From the City & Guilds qualifications offered in 1964 when it was simply Napier Technical College, to the Napier College of Science and Technology years, from 1974 to 1988, when it offered ONC and HND qualifications. We first offered degrees in 1984 and the college became a Polytechnic in 1988. A further Honours year was added in 1992 when Edinburgh Napier became a University, and our first cohort graduated in 1994.Like the institution itself, Photography and Film has gone from strength to strength. Since the late 80’s it has benefitted from a truly international reputation, welcoming students from all over the world.Inevitably the last 35 years have seen several developments in the teaching of Photography and Film at Edinburgh Napier. Higher education in the Arts and Creative Industries cannot remain static; it must move with the demands and expectations of contemporary practice. The next stage of development for our programme is its division into two distinct, specialist programmes – BA (Hons) Film and BA (Hons) Photography

Light and the Manifestation of Performance Place: The Experience of Spaces and Places Through a Different Light.

Through the practice-based lens of the Night in the Garden at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2014) this paper explores how environments, both built and green, can become something powerfully augmented in the regeneration of cities and towns, and introduces the human experience of unexpected events as an affordance of access and belonging. In the last two decades the explosion of the ‘light festival’ as a global phenomenon has created a new night-time language of temporary performance. Our urban environments are straining to develop unique visual representations that have driven a new kind of tourism. The alien performances that play out across our urban centres bring a return to the joy of the unique and the carnivalesque and are situated within the environments that we recognise so differently during the day. This creative practice led perspective, supported exploration of audience engagement and asked questions of how personal and shared experiences are generated and broadcast; whilst recognising this approach as part of a wider place-making phenomena, where visual culture awakens sleeping spaces. The urban domain is a canvas for storytelling open to change each time the festival rolls into town, where physical structures remain unaltered, but our perception of them becomes reanimated

Breaking Well-Formed Opinions and Mindsets by Designing with People Living with Dementia

This paper presents ongoing research that highlights how design thinking and acting can contribute significantly to breaking down preconceived ideas about what people living with dementia are capable of doing. The research, undertaken in collaboration with Alzheimer Scotland and other dementia organisations across the UK, has adopted a range of disruptive design interventions to break the cycle of well-formed opinions, strategies, mindsets and ways-of-doing that tend to remain unchallenged in the health and social care of people living with dementia. The research has resulted in a number of co-designed interventions that help change the perception of dementia by showing that people living with dementia can offer much to UK society after diagnosis. Moreover, it is envisaged that the co-designed activities and interventions presented here will help reconnect people recently diagnosed with dementia to help build their self-esteem, identity and dignity and help keep the person with dementia connected to their community, thus delaying the need for formal support and avoid the need for crisis responses. The paper reports on three design interventions where the authors have worked collaboratively with nearly 200 people diagnosed with dementia across the UK in co-design and development activities. The paper concludes with a number of innovative recommendations for researchers when co-designing with people living with dementia

Are We All Designers?

Several design writers have proposed, or at least implied, that “…we are all designers…” through the way we manipulate the environment around us, select the items we wish to own, plan, build, buy, arrange, and restructure things all in a form of design. During the same time, design as a behavioural phenomenon has increased its capacity and breadth and as a result, design activity extends from the objects we use on a daily basis to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, political systems, digital existences, food production, the way we travel and even cloning sheep. This paper reports on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that seeks to explore current models of creative practice, examining where disciplinary, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological edges lie in an attempt to define the significant drivers of any movements across disciplinary boundaries. The project’s creative workshop activities have also facilitated comparison of the outputs between single-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary group working and has allowed the research team to explore how non-designers and designers alike transfigure creative space during practical design exercises. The outputs of the first workshop pose fundamental questions for the future of design education models based purely on disciplinary perspectives and furthermore questions whether current understandings of design thinking encompass more generalist human traits. The need to educate designers who can surf across disciplinary boundaries to tackle the 21st century’s emerging complex and wicked social, environmental and economic issues suggests a radical rethink against the individual and disciplinary based perspectives that largely prevail

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

Ecological roles and importance of sharks in the Anthropocene Ocean

In ecosystems, sharks can be predators, competitors, facilitators, nutrient transporters, and food. However, overfishing and other threats have greatly reduced shark populations, altering their roles and effects on ecosystems. We review these changes and implications for ecosystem function and management. Macropredatory sharks are often disproportionately affected by humans but can influence prey and coastal ecosystems, including facilitating carbon sequestration. Like terrestrial predators, sharks may be crucial to ecosystem functioning under climate change. However, large ecosystem effects of sharks are not ubiquitous. Increasing human uses of oceans are changing shark roles, necessitating management consideration. Rebuilding key populations and incorporating shark ecological roles, including less obvious ones, into management efforts are critical for retaining sharks’ functional value. Coupled social-ecological frameworks can facilitate these efforts

What Design Research Does ... : 62 Cards Highlighting the Power and Impact of UK-based Design Research in Addressing a Range of Complex Social, Economic, Cultural and Environmental Issues

Design research makes a significant contribution to the UK economy and society as a whole. Ever since the establishment of the Government Schools of Design in the nineteenth century, the UK has been widely acknowledged as an international leader in design research. Following this lead, the What Design Research Does… cards highlight the wide range of social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts that design research, funded and based in the UK, makes all over the world. The 62 cards illustrate unambiguously the positive changes that contemporary UK-based design researchers are making in many complex issues. Each What Design Research Does… card lists the challenges and issues faced by the design researchers, who they collaborated with, the research methods and approaches taken, the outcomes of the design research, what the main results and findings have been, and what impact the design research has had. In short, the What Design Research Does… cards clearly articulate the breadth of social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts that UK-based design researchers are achieving today