Designing for to Designing With: Co-Designing Interventions With Dementia Care Partners

TL;DR

This paper discusses how involving dementia care partners in the design of interventions can better address their needs and challenges.

Contribution

The paper presents a researcher's decade-long journey and lessons learned in shifting from designing for to designing with dementia care partners.

Findings

Co-design empowers care partners to shape interventions that matter most to them.

Sustained partnerships in co-design can democratize the intervention development process.

Academic research structures often pose challenges to full co-design implementation with care partners.

Abstract

Co-design as applied to the design, evaluation, and implementation of interventions for family and friend care partners of people living with dementia has great potential to address the needs and outcomes that matter most to dementia care partners. Co-design democratizes the intervention pipeline through sustained partnership in which co-designers have the decisional and generative power to identify the problem to be solved and collaboratively create the solution. However, fully implementing intervention co-design with dementia care partners can be challenging given care partners’ context and the current structures of academic research. This talk will describe one researcher’s journey from ‘designing for’ to ‘designing with’ family and friend care partners of people living with dementia, sharing approaches, strategies, and lessons learned across ten years of research.