How on earth did I get
here?
Something we all ask
ourselves in a reflective moment, and whilst we’re currently in the Virus lockdown
scenario there’s probably quite a lot of reflecting going on.
I certainly know how my
involvement with dementia design came, about but I didn’t understand how
involved I was until I’d been involved for a while! Probably doesn’t make much
sense but allow me to explain.
Early 2007, my company was
Bupa’s nominated signage provider and a chap called Steve Bradshaw posed the
question ‘can you design bedroom signs for our residents with dementia?’ Steve was an estates manager with Bupa and I’d
worked with Steve for a couple of years at this point.
As a supplier of
graphic display products to a number national retailers we were accustomed to unusual
requests. To keep clients happy at this level it was always a case of: ‘the
answer’s yes, what’s the question?’ So the answer was always going to be ‘yes’
before Steve even tabled the challenge.
The trouble was, whilst
I had expertise in my industry, this was a bit left-field, even for us! And
believe me, we’d done some way-out things over the years!
I briefed my graphic
designer on the project but he couldn’t get a grip on it and the brief was a
bit wishy washy to be fair. It was a case of the blind leading the blind and neither
of us knew what we were looking for anyway. So I took up the challenge myself,
determined to find out what someone with ‘Dementure’ would need to make a sign design
work from them.
I really did spell
Dementia that way at our first design meeting, I had absolutely no knowledge at
all at this point. Lucky I can be a fast learner when I need to be!
In hindsight, it was
really useful to start from the point of knowing absolutely nothing, because as
I later found out, there were so many misconceptions and lack of consensus around
good dementia design. So I was lucky not to have been influenced in any way as
I doubt I would have made any progress.
I took a few days away
from the office and went off-grid with a pile of books, documents I’d
downloaded from t’internet (that’s Yorkshire for Broadband) a lap-top, pad and
pencils. When I returned from the wilderness I was confident I had a grasp of the
common issues that would influence perception and interpretation of visual
information. I also had some spec’s and doodles and things were well on their
way.
I could have stuck the
doodles on the fridge and pretended my grandchild had done them. Instead I gave
them to my artworker and we soon had a product.
I really hadn’t the
vaguest idea that this was anything other than a nice job for Bupa, so when I’d
spent a few hours with Ricky Pollock up at Stirling, I sat in the car park for
a little while in a state of shock. The whole thing didn’t compute, but just as
before, I was glad I had come into this ‘blind’ and focussed entirely on the
task without any distractions.
Over the coming months and
years my brief sabbatical forged the basis of a clear design framework that has
relevance to almost any type of visual-aid that’s intended for use in a dementia-specific
care environment and I’m proud of that.
Fast forward from November
2007 when I launched the sign designs at the Dementia Congress in Harrogate, to
today when my design concept has been copied and used all over the world and only
the quality of production and materials varies depending on whose ‘version’ of
the design you’re looking at.
By way of brief personal
aside: in some ways it’s gratifying when one’s designs are widely adopted and signage
which has its roots in my original design spec’ is prescribed by authorities all
over the world. But I recently heard a quote which, struck a familiar chord,
by the broadly unpleasant 19th century polymath Alexander von
Humboldt, who described the three stages of scientific discovery as such: “First,
people deny it’s true, then they deny it’s important, and finally they credit
the wrong person.” In my experience, this is exactly what happens with
innovative design too.
On the journey to ‘here’
the signage was only the start as it spawned a raft of products based on the same
design principles and driven by client needs. This continued for nearly a
decade and all the time I was learning learning learning. It became a very
positive obsession because I had stumbled into a position of being able to do
something that was really helpful. It mattered. A lot!
Two really significant
things I learnt that in that period are right at the heart of my thinking
today. One was understanding what Reminiscence really is and what it means. The second was understanding colour contrast and
how it can be used. I remember getting very excited about Reminiscence – I really
had a massive light-bulb moment, though it has taken years to figure out how I
can use my skills to really tap into it and make it a powerful resource for peoples
well-being. My new understanding of colour made me realise we had to re-design our
product portfolio because we could make it both more appealing and more effective.
Eventually I realised I
was looking at an approach to dementia-specific design that needs to be applied
across the dementia care environment as a whole. The more I processed these ideas,
the more I was realising the how influential a change in the approach to design
can change how an entire care home unit functions. Not just from the well-being
perspective of the residents, but everything from how it connects with the
community to its sustainability as a profitable enterprise.
I resigned from my own
company and to set about changing the world with the gospel of St Pete. But for
all my conviction, proving how much better care homes can be by changing the content
of the environment is a bloody hard sell. My ideal client is someone who has a budget,
has already come to these conclusions and is just searching to find someone able
to deliver the goods. More likely though, finding people to work with is a hard
slog requiring a lot of ‘convincing’ and then hinges on whether they are
prepared to take a leap-of-faith. But this is how it was in 2007 when I was frequently
asked ‘where’s your evidence’ which I didn’t have of course. But there were
enough early adopters who helped put some wind in the product’s sails and tada!
The rest is history as they say.
Tom Kitwood understood
the influence environment brings to bear on personhood and encapsulates it in this quote: “the
environment has as much effect on the brain as the brain has on a person’s abilities”.
I’ve disrupted the industry
before with signage, red toilet seats, Memory Boxes and Door-cals. Now I want
to change care home environments so they’re no longer unstimulating places to
be afraid of and become reassuring, interesting and relevant to the populous of
the home.
Basic elements of safe
and effective design for dementia
If you’ve skipped to
this but I don’t blame you and forgive me for not getting here sooner; these
are the 7 basic dementia-specific design considerations I’ve used as the basis
of everything I’ve produced since 2007:
- Colour
- Images
- Shape
- Material
- Text
- Contrast
- Durability
More recently I’ve added
an eighth element which pulls all the others together: common sense.
Below are the aspects
within a care home where the design principles should be applied.
- Colour
schemes
- Themes
- Way-finding
- Personalisation
- Destinations
/ Places of Interest
- Lighting
- Toilets
and Bathrooms
By applying the design
principles to these aspects it’s entirely possible to achieve benign but
life-changing improvements and positively affect every aspect of how effectively
a care home functions.
Now I’m here….
Over the coming weeks and
months I intend to share my thoughts and, I hope, the thoughts of others too,
to generate more conversation and thinking about how neglected-yet-important the
environment is. I’d also hope to widen the conversations about dementia and
design and see if we can spawn some creative and productive thinking and some
useful outcomes.
Please subscribe and I’ll
be so grateful for thoughts shared, even if you think I’m speaking total tosh –
I love a challenge 😊.
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