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Creative Spaces - dementia and environment

Engagement Activities

04.06.2010

The Creative Spaces project is about designing landscapes that provide for the needs of people with dementia, their families, friends and carers; places that are inspiring and that help to connect care homes and nursing homes with the communities that surround them.

A big part of the project is to find out what sort of landscape elements will work best for older people with dementia. What sort of activities could go on there? How will people use the places? How can we change little-used outdoor space into a vital and popular community place?

design card

We could ask these questions straight-off but, as everyone who has any experience of community engagement knows, the answers you get back from that method of enquiry are rarely the useful ones. Put people on the spot with questions on a subject that they hadn’t been thinking about and you’ll get one of two answers: the first thing that comes into their heads, or what they think you want to hear. It’s how cold-call telephone sales works, not community engagement.

So, to get some realistic answers that will lead us to some useful designs, we’ll hold some activity days throughout June and July 2010.

The days are a combination of indoor and outdoor activities, both at the care homes and on visits to local places with inspiring landscapes. All the activities explore how residents can be meaningfully involved in the decision-making and design processes that will shape their outdoor spaces.

Outdoor activities include visits to the different landscapes that make up the Eden Project and to local nurseries and garden centres. Indoor activities include creating design cards and planting hanging baskets. All accompanied by tea and cakes and, most importantly, casual conversations about the outdoors, about activities, about likes and dislikes and about memories.

A description of the activities along with some of the results, and how we have integrated them into the designs, will be published here as the project progresses.

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Creative Spaces - dementia and environment

Engagement Activities

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