Senedd Event – 16th March 2018

The LAUGH research team and My Home Life Cymru held an event at the Senedd, ‘LAUGH – A celebration of love and life in care homes’ on Friday 16th March 2018.

The event was the culmination of our three year international AHRC funded design for dementia research project. It was an opportunity to view the objects, meet the researchers and hear the stories behind the designs.  The event was held in collaboration with My Home Life Cymru and ENRICH who are promoting good practice and research in care homes across Wales.

The event was opened by Sarah Rochira, Older People’s Commissioner for Wales.

Other speakers included:

Professor Cathy Treadaway, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Dr Jac Fennell, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Nick Andrews, Wales School for Social Care Research

Suzy Webster, My Home Life Cymru

The event was held at The Senedd – National Assembly for Wales and was kindly sponsored by Lynne Neagle AM.

‘Open Doors’ collaboration with Men’s Shed

Funded by the Gwanwyn Festival (Age Cymru) and Fab-cre8 (Cardiff School of Art and Design), the ‘Open Doors’ project brought members of the Men’s Shed to experience FabLab Cardiff and the new technologies used in developing our range of LAUGH playful objects.  During this visit we co-created a new playful object that combines the hand craft expertise from the Men’s Shed with the digital fabrication available at FabLab.  A short video was made to show this collaboration and can be found here.

Research Features article and video

The LAUGH research features in the latest issue of Research Features.  The article shares the latest findings from the project and presents some of the prototypes designed and made for people living with advanced dementia.  The full article can be found here.

This video was made to accompany the article.

Design 4 Health 2017 conference, Melbourne

Gail gave two presentations about the LAUGH research at the Design 4 Health conference (4th – 7th December 2017).  This international conference for health and design practitioners and researchers was held in Melbourne, Australia.  It was hosted by the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology and Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University.

Abstracts of the presentations (‘Design for dementia: Making spaces for uncertainty’ & ‘Craft as Purpose: Co-design for people living with advanced dementia’) will be published here soon.