Photo Narrative: Co-Designing a Built Environment with Seniors with Mild Cognitive Impairments

Abstract

: In this paper, we introduce “Photo Narrative,” a novel co-design method tailored to actively engage seniors with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners in envisioning and creating a future therapeutic program and built environment. The co-design toolkit addresses the complexity of designing for MCI patients by supporting multidimensional forms of expression and facilitates exploration of various literal and emotional aspects of designing for “healthcare” environments, including type of space, level of interaction in, and look and feel of the built environment. We also introduce and describe a comprehensive data analysis technique, which speaks to the need for and value of interpretations of rich co-design workshop data into insightful design requirements and recommendations