Sensory Rooms: Designing Interventions to support dementia care

Sensory Rooms is an exhibition that has been developed to provide ideas on how new approaches to design could result in the creation of environments that would better suit the needs of people living with dementia. It showcases the results of a recently funded research enquiry into the current provision of multi sensory stimulation for this age group, in particular the design of multi sensory spaces (often referred to as ‘Sensory Rooms’). The overall purpose of the research has been to establish new knowledge from which coherent, user-centred design solutions can be developed.

The exhibition launches a Guide Book “How to make a Sensory Room for people living with dementia” offering advice and ideas on how to construct and design a multi sensory space tailored towards people with dementia.

Visiting the exhibition will be in itself a multi sensory experience as it features projections, textiles, sound and scent.

This work will be of interest to professionals from care practice, policy makers, and designers as well as to those individuals caring for relatives living with dementia.

The viewing of the exhibition will be guided and presented by the researchers Anke Jakob and Lesley Collier, authors of the Guide Book. Each viewing will last between 30 min to 1.5 hrs, depending on the particular interests of the visitors. Book now.

To coincide with ‘Sensory Rooms’,  there will be a discussion event, on Friday 24 Oct, discussing question of how multi-sensory stimulation and design can be delivered in an effective and successful way within a dementia care context, the challenges care homes are facing, and how the education and training needs of care workers in this area can be better addressed and tackled. Please book your place at the discussion here.

The exhibition and the event are the results of an interdisciplinary research project led by Dr Anke Jakob (design researcher, Kingston University London) in collaboration with Dr Lesley Collier (senior lecturer in Occupational Therapy, University of Southampton) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC) and supported by Care UK.

For more information:
http://fada.kingston.ac.uk/de/MSE_design_in_dementia_care/
http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/mse/

 Image by Anke Jakob

Kingston University London