Open Dementia Project

Sept 2015

The Open Dementia project is a project commissioned by Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing to redesign their public awareness programme about dementia. Instead of focusing on talks and games by instruction, we choice to anchor the experience on tangible objects. The inspiration is from the social model of disability, for which it stress that for very often it is not the disability itself but the material world actually disabled a person. In collaboration with the illustrastor Don Mak, we first did a visualisation of the most common symptoms of dementia by asking a simple question: “What if the whole city is being demented?”

The lab designed a set of “dementia experience tools” that redesigned everyday objects that actually let the participants live through the experience of being a demented person. The aim is to bring empathy to the participants. The whole set consists of 11 different “dementing-objects” which each of them correspond to a specific symptom of dementia. The final tools are developed through a series of Codesign workshops with the social workers, researchers and managing personnel at the centre, as well as occupational therapists.