Designing the ‘Perfect Day’ Service Around People Living with Dementia

Abstract

This paper describes the author’s ongoing collaborative work with Alzheimer Scotland that seeks to explore how design thinking and action might best contribute to the design and development of a range of products, services, and systems for people living with dementia. The paper focuses on one of three recently completed collaborative design projects undertaken with Alzheimer Scotland entitled ‘Perfect Day’. The ‘Perfect Day’ project aims to better support dementia care support workers and family members who care for people living with dementia through envisioning how they describe their ‘Perfect Day’. For example, David’s “Perfect Day” is playing a round of golf with his friends whilst Bet’s “Perfect Day” would be spent playing dominoes and poker. Overall, the key aim of this work is to better understand how design can most effectively contribute to the development of a range of products, services and systems for people living with dementia. This work, which has adopted a co-design interventionist approach, has facilitated explorations around a range of novel design contributions aimed at improving product and service innovation in a third sector context. It has also provided excellent first-hand opportunities to work with Alzheimer Scotland staff and relevant bodies, which has helped facilitate the design, development, and evaluation of a number of creative design interventions.