Book Launch: Design for Dementia, Mental Health and Wellbeing

Our online book launch will bring together the editors and contributors of this exciting volume. We will explore key issues of co-design, design interventions and design policy for enhancing mental health and wellbeing, including advancements, benefits and gaps for discussion by our speakers and panel.

Introduction by the editors: The editors, Professor Kristina Niedderer, UK, Professor Geke Ludden, Netherlands, Professor Tom Dening, UK, and Professor Vjera Holthoff, Germany, will provide an overview of the focus, aims and context of the book.

Author contributions: A number of our international contributors will introduce their chapters and how they co-design interventions with people to improve various aspects of mental health and wellbeing. Contributors include: Rosa Almeida and Raquel Losada, Spain; Leigh-Anne Hepburn, Australia, Elena Bellini, Italy, and others.

Panel discussion, including Q&A: Chaired by Dr Anna Bergqvist, editors and contributors will explore some of the critical points around the role and recognition of design as well as design policy (and the lack thereof) in the health and care context to elicit current issues and future opportunities.

The book:

This edited volume offers the first overview of how design can contribute to people’s wellbeing and mental health in the context of dementia, mental illness and neurodiversity. The book explores and promotes holistic, wellbeing-focused and preventive strategies that recognise and respond to people’s needs, wants, wishes and rights to further health, wellbeing and equality. Being experienced designers and clinicians, the contributors to the book emphasise how design can be a collaborative, creative process as well as an outcome of this process. Through its three parts, the book explores themes of ethics, citizenship and power relationships in co-design; of the culturally and value sensitive adaptation of design interventions and their applications; and of policy and related standards in and for design and mental health. In this way, the book demonstrates how design can help to support people, their care partners and care professionals in promoting mental health and wellbeing. It offers a rich overview and resource on how to create a sustainable future for care in this domain for designers, researchers, students, policy providers and health and care professionals to help support the development and adoption of person-centred design processes and interventions.

Find out more about our book: 10.4324/9781003318262

Editors:

• Kristina Niedderer is Professor of Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
• Geke Ludden is Professor of Interaction Design at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
• Tom Dening is Professor of Dementia Research in the School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK.
• Vjera Holthoff-Detto is Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany.