'To Design for Simplicity'
Playful with Dementia
The
Final Master Project
2023 / 2024
The population in the Netherlands is ageing and the risk for people to develop dementia increases. Research has found that audio, music and soundscapes of everyday sounds help people with dementia to trigger feelings of reminiscence, and can positively infuence social interactions. In this report, an audio-based communicative tool was developed named Archiful. Archiful relies on stories and conversations which develop based on the personalised auditive triggers of the tool. Archiful was developed using an iterative design method, with insights from experts, caretakers and people with dementia. A marketing and business perspective was introduced throughout the development to design for real impact and with values of multiple stakeholders taken into account. The design was able to support these conversations, but was not tested in a relative-on-person with dementia setting. This report suggests more emphasis on designing for caretakers at home, who deal with communication issues and suggests exploring sounds in dementia care more often.
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Fair Share
A design project for a client working for youth care centres in the Netherlands started a project surrounding the topic of working alliance. Working alliance, described as the relationship between a care professional and their client, can have positive effects on the treatment motivation and potentially the treatment outcome of youth in youth care. This project continued with a project initiated by Garage2020, a company that designs with and for youth and their environment. The project named Fair Share, developed a tool that provides topics for care professionals and their clients to talk about during the treatment sessions. The product provides the users with a time unit, an emotion and a situation, based on which the users should formulate a question and answer. The question should first be formulated by the care professional and answered, to introduce a safe space for sharing for the client participating. The tool was developed in an iterative design process with expert and client insights to iterate on. Eventually, the tool was evaluated with experts (n=4) and students (n=4) on its functionality and gained critical feedback to improve on.
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