Dementia affects currently 800,000 people in the UK and is predicted to exceed one million people by 2021. Although there is no cure for dementia, cognitive and behavioural interventions, as well as exercise programmes relating to daily living activities are most beneficial at improving the quality of life of people with Dementia and slowing down the decline associated with the disease.

In this project we will be running a number of workshops within the Age UK Lancashire Community (with people at the early stages of Dementia, their caregivers and Age UK ) with the aim to empower workshop participants to becoming designers themselves. Through a number of creative and playful activities workshop participants will be able to share their aspirations, needs and experiences and (with the help of designers from the University) come up with ideas to create plans or models (prototypes) of these ideas.

In a follow-up stage of the project, these ideas and prototypes will be then taken forward by the research project team and be realised. These would be given to workshop participants to be iteratively tested and share feedback in order to improve them.

The project has been funded by the Creative Exchange.