Caregiving and dementia/Projects/Dementia environmental design in undergraduate architecture and design curricula

This page describes a Dementia Training Study Centre project.

Dementia environmental design in undergraduate architecture and design curricula

Overview

This project begins to plug a gap in the education of architects by introducing opportunities for them to study the empirically based principles of design for people with dementia that have emerged over the last 25 years. The schools of architecture in the University of Tasmania (UTAS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) collaborated with the NSW/ACT DTSC to develop design schools and other educational opportunities to be offered to their undergraduate students in 2011 and 2012.

The overall aim of this project was to raise awareness in the minds of architectural students of the availability of evidence based principles that they can use to guide the design of facilities for people with dementia. The specific objectives were to:

1. Develop educational opportunities, e.g. workshops, design schools, field trips in UTAS and UNSW schools of architecture.
2. Provide a report on the project, and a set of materials, that will encourage other schools of architecture to adopt a similar strategy.

A recent report written for the UNSW DCRC [9] identified gaps in the education of architects that restrict their ability to provide good advice on the design of facilities for people with dementia. One of the strategies suggested for overcoming this problem was the inclusion of design for dementia in the curricula of schools of architecture.

More information

1. Paper - TBA