Towards Design and Making Hubs for People Living with Dementia

This paper reports on the authors’ Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded work that is developing and implementing innovative design interventions that encourage people living with dementia to remain creatively active, promote dignity, and encourage independence. This work examines how the integrative, inclusive, and collaborative actions of co-design and design disruption as theoretical approaches, involves people living with dementia in rethinking and reshaping or circumventing existing forms of dementia care. Moreover, this work seeks to change mind-sets and extant prejudiced ideas about what people living with dementia might be capable of undertaking. The inclusive activity of collaboratively designing with people who are not designers themselves, seeks to challenge and alter preconceived ideas about the capabilities of people living with dementia. The paper highlights a number of innovative interventions showing how people living with dementia can be empowered by design and how they can be supported in informing conditions where their personal identity, values, knowledge, skills, experiences, perspectives and thoughts are integral to the production of new ideas and ways of thinking and doing co-design.