Designing for People with Dementia: Designing for Mindful Self-Empowerment and Social Engagement (MinD)

Designing for People with Dementia

A 48 month International project aimed at understanding how designers can use mindful approaches to improve the lives of people with dementias. This project aims to help people with dementia engage in social contexts to improve psychosocial wellbeing. People who are affected by dementia often face cognitive, behavioural and psychosocial difficulties, including impairment and degeneration of memory and of perceptions of identity. Design can offer novel ways of complementing existing care approaches to empower people with dementia in everyday social situations. Utilising the concept of mindful design, we are investigating innovative design solutions to enable self-empowerment and confidence building of people living with dementia. We will study how personal and/or wearable designs can help mediate perceptions of identity and emotion management; and how environmental aspects can reduce feelings of information overload and instil feelings of self-empowerment and control. We are involved in this project because of our expertise in researching people interacting with products and interfaces, particularly in relation to emotion and intuition.

 

Other Team Members

  • K Niedderer
  • W Nicholls
  • A Clifford

Funding / Grants

  • Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Horizon 2020 EU International Project (2016 - 2021)

Partners