Co-designing a Home with Dementia

The Doctoral Network “Co-designing a Home with Dementia” (HOMEDEM) is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Actions' Innovative Training Network that will provide high-level training in design and dementia caregiving, to high achieving, early-stage researchers. HOMEDEM focuses on the recent move across Europe towards supporting people with dementia (PwD) living at home (if that is their desire) for as long as possible with appropriate care. This move towards a reliance on care constellations (the dynamic informal care relationships with and around the person with dementia) calls for the Training Network to carry out research at several levels: the micro level, how dementia affects relationships between PwD and their care constellations; the meso, understanding the changing needs of the home living environment and at the macro level, understanding how care constellations navigate the complex care ecosystem of community-based support and services. By equipping doctoral candidates with the transferable skills required for succeeding in careers at the crossroads of design and disciplines like psychosocial health sciences, economics and policy evaluation, the training in HOMEDEM will enable these researchers to respond to current and future care contexts and will result in their being able to influence the way community-based care for PwD and their care constellation is organised, and how products, services and tools are co-designed and implemented within care contexts across Europe. Achieved by a unique combination of collaborative and practical research training, non-academic industry-based secondments, and through schools and seminars that cover transferable interpersonal, communication, cognitive and entrepreneurial skills facilitated by the selected composition of academic and non-academic consortium members, the result will be a new infrastructure of care that draws on the fusion of care and design leading to emerging models of care for PwD and their care constellation.