Designing with dementia: Guidelines for participatory design together with persons with dementia

Abstract

Involving all stakeholders in the design process is often seen as a necessity from both a pragmatic and a moral point of view [1]. This is always a challenging task for designers and stakeholders and therefore many participatory design methods have been developed to facilitate such a design process. The traditional participatory design methods, however, are not fully appropriate to incorporate persons with dementia [2], [3]. They create issues as they assume that the participants are cognitively able; can make use of visual and hands-on techniques; or require a high level of abstraction ability of the person with dementia. The aim of this paper is to present a number of guidelines which can be used as a starting point to set up participatory design projects with persons with dementia. This overarching set of guidelines provides for practical advice focusing on the role of the moderator, the preparation of a participatory session, the choice and adaptation of the method, the tools used, the role of each participant and the subsequent analysis. The basis for these guidelines stems from similar participatory projects with senior participants, persons with dementia and participants with aphasia or amnesia, two symptoms frequently co-occurring with dementia. All guidelines were evaluated and refined during four sessions with persons with dementia and a trusted family member. These participatory design sessions occurred in the course of the AToM project, a research and design project that tries to design an intelligent network of objects and people to ameliorate the life of persons with dementia. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.