The next edition of the Dementia Lab Conference will take place on 13-14 March 2025, hosted by the University of Aveiro, Portugal. The 2025 edition is jointly organised by ID+ (Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture), and CINTESIS@RISE (Center for Health Technology and Services Research at the Associate Laboratory RISE – Health Research Network).
Established in 2016, the Dementia Lab is a growing community that continues to build on a legacy of designing for and with people living with dementia and their surrounding context.
Approached from an inclusive, participatory and person-centered perspective, the Dementia Lab Conference allows for focused discussion with like-minded designers, researchers, carers and other professionals operating within this domain. Where in other venues it might be challenging to convey the experience of working with people with dementia, or the urgency of working in this field, the Dementia Lab Conference tries to provide a platform of inclusion. As the number of people with dementia continues to increase worldwide, designers, educators and carers are continuously presented with new challenges. As a collective network, we believe that design can help improve the potential of products, technology, services and environments to alleviate these challenges and contribute to the quality of life, care and well-being of people living with dementia.
Dementia Lab 2025 theme: ethics + aesthetics in design
The theme of the Dementia Lab Conference 2025 will look at ethics and aesthetics. Although often not recognised as paramount topics, both are central when designing for, and together with people with dementia, as well as when selecting and using any kind of products in dementia care.
In the work with and for people with dementia, we often are confronted with ethical issues and concerns. Not only because we are dealing with people who might be vulnerable, and whose diagnosis is evolving, but also because this leads to differences in the experience of realities and beliefs, which we might be difficult to understand and respond to. This is, sometimes, perceived as a constraint to the creativity and aesthetic freedom of the designer. On the other hand, aesthetics is occasionally regarded as not relevant or worthy for people with dementia. However, being a provider of aesthetic experiences, design can contribute to turning the world that surrounds us more pleasant, comforting and attractive, thus potentially more inviting, stimulating and inclusive. By ‘aesthetic’, we not only refer to beauty but to an embodied engagement with the world, through the senses, which becomes even more crucial to acknowledge and incentivize as dementia progresses. Therefore, aesthetics might also support more ethical care practices and a means to challenge stigma.
The next edition of Dementia Lab invites you to reflect and engage in discussions around ethics and aesthetics, and the tensions and associations between them.
Keynotes
Yuriko Saito, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA, and Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. Her research areas are everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. She has lectured widely on these subjects, both within the United States and globally, and her writings have been published as book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. She also published Everyday Aesthetics (2008, Oxford University Press) and Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (2017, Oxford University Press, awarded the 2018 Outstanding Monograph Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics), and Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (2022, Bloomsbury).
Matthew Harrison is the Head of Design at Imperial College’s Helix Centre, a design team situated in a major London teaching hospital. Within this role, he leads the Human Centred Design work in the UK Dementia Research Institute Care Research & Technology Centre. The centre aims to use smart-home technologies to support people living with dementia, and learn more about the disease and its impact on quality of life. Matthew’s mission in this role is to ensure the technologies we develop fit the needs and aspirations of the people we are designing for; people with, and affected by dementia, and the professionals that support them. Matthew has an engineering and industrial design education, and a career built around inclusive design and Human Centred Design in research settings at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, Royal College of Art, and 10+ years at Helix Centre. His experience includes design of end-of-life care, paediatric medication, patient experience, and dementia.
Call for Participation
The Dementia Lab Conference 2025 calls for contributions to the conference program through both professional and personal experiences, from the entire dementia and design spectrum: from care partners to design practitioners and companies, to design and dementia researchers and educators from different domains.
To facilitate this, we offer different forms of participation through the submission of full academic research papers↓ (published by Springer, Open Access), workshops↓, stories↓ (non-academic articles, videos or posters), and an exhibition↓. PhD-students interested or currently working on design for/with people with dementia are invited to participate in the PhD Day↓, hosted in collaboration with the MSCA Doctoral Network HOMEDEM, the INTERDEM Academy and the research project DECOHDE, on the 12th of March. For each of these opportunities, the appropriate templates, guidelines and submission dates are available below.
The theme of the Dementia Lab Conference 2025 is “ethics and aesthetics in design” and welcomes contributions and reflections in three domains: designing with people with dementia, designing for people with dementia and including design in dementia care (more information on the conference theme here).
All submissions and presentations should be in English and use inclusive language about dementia.
