QUT Design Lab invites you to a guest lecture by Dr Megan Strickfaden, University of Alberta, Canada.
Dr Strickfaden is a scholar, anthropologist, complex problem solver and designer. She has lived and worked as a designer, educator and researcher globally in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Mexico, USA and Canada. Most recently her research focuses on exploring how sociocultural factors, such as the ability to relate to the design process and the cultural milieu of designing. She has spent a great deal of time researching material environments for older adults in the Netherlands, China, and Canada; and over the past two years she is the only researcher worldwide to have studied de Hogeweyk “the dementia village” in the Netherlands, which is documented in two films Dementia Care by Design and De Hogeweyk: A Material Look into Dementia Care (2015). She has recently released a co-edited book (along with Patrick Devlieger) called Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society (2016, Garant Publishers, Antwerpen) and early next year she will release a second book: Foundations in the Material Environments of Aging (2017, Yunshi IET, Beijing).
Design-Able: ‘Learning from a Village’ and Other Ethnographic Stories for Designers
Things, stuff, gadgets, doodads, artifacts, objects, spaces…all make up the material environment that designers take part in scripting. Material environments or ‘the ecology of spaces and things’ challenge, support, take away from, and/or create barriers for persons with disabilities and older adults. People have deep and meaningful relationships with things, and things have been shaping and comforting people throughout history. Through a series of ethnographic stories collected over the past two decades, this talk highlights insights on how designers can think about designing differently for specialized stakeholders.
This seminar is hosted by Design Lab’s Dr Janice Rieger.