DESIGNING FO Shaz Hawkins, Health & Aged Care Marketing Manager at Tarkett, explains how empathy
Dementia has been described as one of the most significant health crises of the 21st century. In the absence of a cure and with an ageing population, we need to design environments that take into account how people with dementia behave and see the world.
SPACES TO EXPLORE Those living with dementia often feel a strong urge to wander, which can cause problems if they become disorientated and forget where they are. Nurses list ‘wandering’ in their top five challenges. However, it is possible to design spaces in a way that works with this urge rather than trying to subdue it. Designing a care home with a focal point gives the wandering resident the sense that they’re going somewhere, an area with resources like books and a television, or a communal area that encourages socialising. The key point is that the space feels different from the space they’ve just left and offers some kind of stimulation.
BEING AND FEELING SAFE It’s obviously essential for any space used by vulnerable people to be safe, but to encourage people to stay mobile, you also need to think about their perception of safety. Someone designing the flooring for a care home would probably think about factors such as the evenness of surfaces, wheelchair access and avoiding trip hazards such as clutter or rugs. However, a person with dementia might still view a perfectly level, clear floor as a hazard and refuse to step onto it. Tarkett’s extensive research into how people with dementia view their surroundings has found that colour contrasts are much more important than most of us realise. People with dementia tend to have trouble with three-dimensional vision, which means that they use changes in colour to fill in the spatial cues they’re missing. A contrast in colour on a floor could be perceived as a change in depth, making the floor seem uneven and unsafe to walk on.
It’s hard to understand how someone could miss a door that’s right in front of them or feel anxiety over walking on a perfectly level floor. But if we are to design spaces that work for vulnerable and neurodiverse people, we need to try. That’s why Tarkett has adopted a virtual reality (VR) tool that allows professional to see the world through the eyes of a person living with dementia. This ‘virtual reality empathy platform’ is the world’s first and only evidence-based dementia filter and through it you’ll see scary changes in depth that make a floor seem dangerous to walk on. Knowing what the users of your space actually see will allow you to design dementia-friendly facilities.
MAXIMISING LIGHT Good lighting is one of the most important tools for making a space dementia friendly. Maximising access to natural light will help to remove the shadows that might be perceived as a danger and it will also help people with dementia to regulate their body clock, which is an increasing problem as the condition progresses. Good natural light in the day combined
24 | CARE HOMES
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