The Bridges for Dementia network aims to to explore how technology can support people with dementia to live full, connected and independent lives. Working across arts, health, social care and technology, we co-design solutions with people who have lived experience to ensure they are meaningful and usable.
For the lived experience panel I presented In Touch: Co-Producing Personalised Sensory Objects for Sharing Memory, a proposal for touch-based, textile objects to help create connection between people around past, present, and future experiences, for the person themselves and those around them.
In Touch is motivated by the idea of personhood: that a person’s sense of self is best understood through their relationships with others, and that personalised, technology-enabled objects have the potential to support these relationships directly – a feeling, gesture, song, textile or way of expressing something can carry meaning across a lifetime and between generations.
The focus is on exploring connection through design and making: a stage that involves working directly with materials, textures, conversations and sounds to develop prototypes. A grandchild holding something that communicates something of who their grandmother is, a conversation prompted in the present, a thread between who someone has been and who they still are.
What is this project about?
- Exploring connection through design and making working directly with materials, textures, conversations and sounds to develop prototypes.
- Touch-based, textile objects that help create connection between people.
- Connection across past, present, and future experiences — for the person themselves, and for those around them.
Why personhood matters
- We understand a person best through their relationships with others.
- Can personalised objects, using technology, support these relationships directly?
- A feeling, gesture, song, or textile can carry meaning across a lifetime, and between generations.
Co-producing this work
- Co-producing means continuous, shared input — not a one-off conversation.
- Technology for people living with dementia can only be developed alongside people who understand, from lived experience, what touch, memory, identity, and relationship feel like.