Jayne Wallace

Mariana's Song is a multisensory experience for care home residents unable to take part in regular activities. Designed to support Personhood through a blended physical/digital installation, it is a user-led experience, centered around video and closely facilitated in concert with expert arts practitioners. The narrative and duration of the interaction is guided by each resident, unique on each viewing, which includes ‘sensory props’ that guide each resident's experience and stimulate the senses to create a transformative space. We provide a worked example of digital, physical, and spatial design decisions taken to reinforce Personhood for residents with advanced dementia. We present learnings from 106 sessions, facilitated one to one between Artists and residents. We contribute to the literature around designing to Materialize Personhood, informed by Kitwood's 12 key characteristics, as well as Parametricism, a novel approach to non-linear experiences, to support the unique needs of people with advanced dementia.

Alongside the benefits of a world in which more and more things are internet connected (i.e., the IoT), scaffolded by increasingly powerful AI systems, there is a growing recognition of a flipside to this vision of the future. Issues associated with privacy, transparency, legibility and trust have been widely recognized – which the Mozilla Foundation has encapsulated in their Internet Health Reports [13]. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos. We will use embroidery as a craft-oriented ‘thinking through making’ activity as the foundation for discussions of our craft characteristics of which consist of; bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care. Participants will gain a rich understanding of debates around IoT while being engaged in a ‘thinking through doing’ embodied approach to gaining new insights and leave with their own hand embroidered badge.

This paper describes the challenges and lessons learned in the experience-centered design (ECD) of the Spheres of Wellbeing, a technology to promote the mental health and wellbeing of a group of women, suffering from significant mental health problems and living in a medium secure hospital unit. First, we describe how our relationship with mental health professionals at the hospital and the aspirations for person-centric care that we shared with them enabled us, in the design of the Spheres, to innovate outside traditional healthcare procedures. We then provide insights into the challenges presented by the particular care culture and existing services and practices in the secure hospital unit that were revealed through our technology deployment. In discussing these challenges, our design enquiry opens up a space to make sense of experience living with complex mental health conditions in highly constrained contexts within which the deployment of the Spheres becomes an opportunity to think about wellbeing in similar contexts.