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The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
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Interaction and Interface Design for and with People with Dementia
Dementia is a syndrome that mainly affects people over the age of 65 and the probability is increasing with age. Current literature and statistics show that the number of people with dementia will double by 2050 in Germany, as about 200,000 new cases are annually expected. Furthermore there are approximately 10 million sufferers in Europe and nearly 18 million cases of dementia worldwide.
People with the most forms of dementia face the progressive and nowadays still incurable degeneration of their cognitive powers and commonly one particularly devastating effect – loss of memory. This affects their ability to carry out previously familiar tasks, like getting dressed or making a cup of tea, and to recognize places, individuals and objects. Those with dementia often feel lost in terms of time and place. As symptoms progress people with dementia increasingly become dependent on others to help them cope with the challenges of daily life.
This research concentrates on interaction and interface design, investigating how contemporary technology could support people with dementia to handle their daily tasks and activities, such as remembering appointments, maintaining social contacts, performing activities of daily life and organizing their day.
The aim of the Interaction and Interface Design for and with People with Dementia project (in collaboration with T-Systems) is literally to help people with dementia navigate through their day and to explore how interaction and interface design can be as simple and understandable so people with progressive cognitive impairment can independently use it.
In the project, people with mild dementia are the primary target group and they and their informal and professional carers are included in the development process of an application that aims to support them. User-centered and co-design methods are being used to involve stakeholders of dementia in this process, create new ideas and make decisions based on their experiences, rather than focusing on technology only.
