| dc.description.abstract | The PhD work addresses the involvement of persons with dementia in participatory design. Persons with dementia are, for many reasons, challenging to involve. They are often left out of the design process due to ethical and practical difficulties and a lack of methodological knowledge. The cognitive decline associated with the disease complicates their participation in typical participatory design activities such as interviews, workshops, and idea generation, as these activities require the ability to reason, reflect upon their own needs, and communicate their needs and ideas verbally or visually.
The overall goal for this thesis has been to study how persons with dementia and their caregivers can be included and can influence the design of supportive technology that empowers persons with dementia. When this thesis was initiated in 2009, few projects had involved people with dementia in the design process. Also at that time, few had used GPS as an assistive technology related to safe walking, and it was an ethically debated tool. This made it particularly interesting and important to explore how people with dementia could influence solutions for safe walking. Therefore, the framework for this thesis has been to explore how people with dementia can be included in the fuzzy front end of design and how their participation can affect the design agenda.
The underlying objectives have been to investigate (a) if and how methods and processes may be adapted to successfully involve persons with dementia, (b) whether doing so is perceived as valuable, and (c) what their involvement actually contributes to in terms of needs, wishes, and design proposals.
The main contributions from the thesis are: (a) method stories of experienced challenges and possibilities from codesign sessions with persons with dementia; (b) suggestions for safe walking solutions that address the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers, changing the main focus from security to self-help and collaboration; and (c) knowledge about how various stakeholders contribute to the design of a safe walking system.
Through this thesis, I hope to inspire more involvement of persons with dementia, and further exploration of dementia-friendly design methods and processes. | en_US |
