Abstract
Maintaining social participation in late life is an important component of general well-being. For people with dementia, participating in social interactions may become increasingly challenging with the progression of the condition. Social technologies can potentially support and empower them in this setting, yet there is a need to get a comprehensive understanding of how their social participation is hindered and facilitated through technology. This paper presents the outcomes of four co-creation sessions conducted together with four couples. We explored their experienced social challenges and identified opportunities for design to improve their social participation. These focus on compensating for internal and external barriers through design, enhancing agency through the social and physical environment, and learning from previous experiences with existing social technologies. Furthermore, we provide recommendations for future research in the context of social technologies for people with dementia. We argue that design-research should focus on embracing the importance of a broader social context, sharing meaningful activities, and incorporating social contact into the everyday routines. The significance of these outcomes indicates the relevance of well-designed novel social technologies to enrich people’s with dementia experience in the social context.
The first two authors contributed equally to the paper.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all participants that shared their experiences during the study. We are grateful to ZonMW for funding our ‘Dementia Dynamics in Design’ project in the Create Health program, a multi-disciplinary consortium consisting of researchers from the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a Mental Care institute (GGzE), and an innovation network for active and healthy ageing (Corporation Slimmer Leven 2020).
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Kolasinska, A.B., Thoolen, M., Peek, S., Lu, Y., Brankaert, R. (2021). Co-creating Design Opportunities for Social Technology in the Context of Dementia. In: Brankaert, R., Raber, C., Houben, M., Malcolm, P., Hannan, J. (eds) Dementia Lab 2021: Supporting Ability Through Design. D-Lab 2021. Design For Inclusion, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70293-9_11
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