How is life? Experiences from codesigning with people with dementia

KADK and CODE invites all who are interested in how design and especially codesign processes can contribute to social innovation. In the seminar researchers from Portugal, Belgium and Denmark will tell about both different codesign approaches and outcomes from projects engaging people suffering from dementia. The three presentations will be followed by a plenary discussion. The aim is together with the audience to share experiences, reflect upon challenges and point to future directions in designing with people living with various cognitive and/or sensory impairments.

Rita Maldonado Branco

Rita Maldonado Branco is a communication designer and PhD student from the University of Porto and the Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture (ID+), Portugal. Her research is about how design can facilitate communication with people with dementia. During her MA, Rita proposed informative and more empathetic ways of representing dementia, as well as some tools to mediate interaction. In her PhD project she explores how design can enable people with dementia and their families to develop personalised strategies for interaction. Rita will share experiences from both projects.

Niels Hendriks
Niels Hendriks is part of the Social Spaces research group, University of Leuven, Belgium. In his participatory design research work together with people with Dementia he looks at how the designer-researcher steps into the subjective world of persons with dementia and their network to make them agent actors in a design process. Niels will share experiences from several research projects but also present the add-ons for a walker, a 3D audio track to support fysiotherapy and a coloring book for persons with dementia as some of the designs that came out of the various participatory design processes.

Gudrun Risak and Andrea Otterstrøm Nørgaard

Gudrun Risak and Andrea Otterstrøm Nørgaard both have a MA in design from KADK. Their thesis “At Alzheimers” is an ethnography on everyday life with Alzheimer’s disease, focusing on challenges, concerns and hope. The project is based on a series of meetings between Gudrun and Andrea, and 3 couples, sharing the life circumstance that one of them is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Dialogues and design (probing) material are presented to show how everybody has their individual ways of handling living with Alzheimer’s. Gudrun and Andrea will talk about the vast effort to maintain dignity and equality in the relation between husband and wife, but also the common struggle to “stay normal” in relation to their surroundings.

The seminar is arranged by CODE
(Center for research on codesign, coproduction and social innovation) at KADK.