One of the most pressing challenges facing designers today is how to create appropriate, useful and safe designs for people living with advanced dementia. Dementia is a complex disease that presents and progresses differently for each individual. This paper contends that co-design with experts, including people living with dementia and their carers, is essential to inform design. Compassionate Design principles are useful to guide the creative process and ensure that concepts are developed that maintain the dignity, personhood and wellbeing of the person living with dementia. The key themes of Compassionate Design are presented through examples of designs for playful objects created as part of the LAUGH design for dementia research. A qualitative participatory co-design research methodology is described along with findings informed by a Live Lab evaluation of the objects with people living with advanced dementia living in residential care.

The LAUGH project is a recently completed international three-year UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded design research project. Outcomes from the research include a collection of playful objects designed to support the wellbeing of people living with advanced dementia that aim to provide comfort, pleasure and fun. These artefactsa series of seven prototypes of playful objects, have recently been exhibited in London at the Royal Society of Arts, the Senedd in Cardiff and in Sydney, Australia. This visual essay provides an explanation of the research underpinning the designs and the Compassionate Design methodology that has informed the work. Those in society who have the greatest need for excellent design are often the most vulnerable and may find it difficult or impossible to articulate what they want due to physical, sensory or memory impairment as a result of accident or disease. These people need innovative design solutions that are highly appropriate, customizable and sustainable. Finding ways to understand the challenges they face moment-by-moment and day-by-day is vital. Including them, and those who care for them, in a co-design process can provide rich insights into design requirements and result in better design solutions. LAUGH has involved key experts in dementia, including those living with the disease and their carers, at every stage in the research process. Each of the LAUGH playful objects has been designed for a specific person living with advanced dementia. Most of them contain embedded electronics, are interactive, stimulate the senses and are highly personalized. The design narratives behind three of the playful objects will be explained in relation to the three key themes of Compassionate Design, which stress the importance of personalization, sensory stimulation and maintaining connections between people and the world.

Design can improve the quality of life of people living with dementia but creating successful design solutions is not simple, due to the complexity of the medical condition, and the ethical considerations of including those affected in design research and evaluation. This article describes research involving an interactive product, ‘HUG’, developed from academic research, to support the wellbeing of people living with advanced dementia, which is now commercially available. People affected by dementia were included at every stage in the design research process. The evaluation of HUG took place in both hospital and care home contexts with 40 participants living with dementia. In this paper, a qualitative hospital study is described, in which patients received a HUG on prescription. Findings reveal that although HUG was rejected by some, those patients who did accept it benefitted significantly. Not only did the device reduce distress, anxiety and agitation but it also helped with patient compliance in medical procedures, aspects of daily care and enhanced communication and socialisation. The Alzheimer’s Society’s accelerator partnership funding has enabled this product to be manufactured and made commercially available so that the benefits of this academic design research can be made more widely available to people living with dementia.

Objective: Family caregivers are the mainstay of caregiving support to persons with dementia, and often care for a family member with dementia for a decade or more prior to institutionalization or death. Malnutrition, including weight loss, is common among older adults with dementia, occurs throughout the disease process, and is associated with institutionalization and death. Nutrition education for caregivers is an important aspect of addressing the care needs of adults with dementia; however, nutrition education research in community-based persons and families experiencing dementia is minimal to non-existent. The need for tailored education resources ranks as highly important among caregivers; however, the nutrition concerns of caregivers in the home have not been identified. The purpose of the current study was to gather descriptive data about the nutrition-related concerns of family caregivers of persons with dementia. Design: A qualitative descriptive design using semi-structured interviews of caregivers of persons with dementia (n = 4) was used to collect the data. Thematic and content analysis was used. Results: Family caregivers experienced nutrition-related concerns and described a need for nutrition education to support the caregiving role. Four themes emerged: (1) meal preparation and food choices; (2) lack of appetite and eating behaviors; (3) making sense of existing nutrition information; (4) searching for reliable nutrition information. A discussion of each theme, including exemplars, is presented, along with suggestions provided by participants regarding how to address existing nutrition education resource needs.Conclusions: Issues surrounding care often are complex and require accurate and tailored information. Findings from the current study provide rich, valuable data regarding the needs of family caregivers with respect to nutrition concerns, allowing for the development, design, testing, and delivery of nutrition education resources and strategies.

We live in a world full of data being generated in exabytes by citizens, devices, buildings and assets intricately embedded in our environments. Whilst there is potential for this data to improve many things, much of it is unused and invisible to the average citizen who in turn may have switched off through ‘data fatigue’. This paper introduces the concept of the data impression through data physicalisation as a way to engage citizens in their data. Like the art impressionists of the late 1800’s (who broke away from photo-realist painting), the authors of this paper want to break away from the rendering of detailed and complex dashboards of endless and graphs and statistics to create an engaging and meaningful impression through dynamic physical objects and systems. These ideas are explored through the detailed reporting and reflection on an 18-month data physicalisation project (Daptec) funded by the Welsh Government Smart Expertise (European Regional Development Fund). This project brought together a number of industry and academic partners around the problem of communicating environmental data relating to Flat Holm Island, a mainly uninhabited site of special scientific interest a few miles from the coast of Cardiff. The resulting physical smart technologies developed for the project were exhibited in Cardiff’s Techniquest science centre in spring 2022 with view to promoting dialogue around the island and its ecology, a more sustainable tourism and positive environmental practices for our smart cities.