YEORYIA MANOLOPOULOU AND NÍALL MC LAUGHLIN
LOSING MYSELF
Statement about the Research Content and Process Description
2. Stories: a collection of accounts by friends and relatives of people with Alzheimer’s disease;
This project examines, through an architectural lens, the experiences of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and associated challenges and opportunities affecting the design, maintenance and management of buildings and communities. It aims to encourage thought and debate around dementia design, critiquing current reductive design guidelines while proposing an original mode of drawing centred on human experience.
3. Drawing: investigating a new method of architectural representation to describe space from the perspective of occupants, culminating into an immersive installation with informed and emotional content; 4. Collaboration: working closely with a collective of architects, graphic designers, installation and sound artists;
Questions
5. Communication: developing a website that effectively shares our research with non-specialist audiences.
1. How does the human mind create an understanding of space? 2. What findings from neuroscience, art, anthropology, healthcare and policy can help architects design for people living with dementia and, more broadly, for all of us?
Dissemination
The Irish Pavilion was one of the highlights of the 2016 Venice Biennale, which in six months attracted 260,000 visitors. It was globally reviewed in diverse publications like The Lancet, WIRED, The Irish Times and Il Sole 24 Ore. Its website is a dementiafriendly repository of findings on open access. The authors have discussed their research in publications like Arts and Dementia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Mateus-Berr and Gruber 2020) and in public presentations for the Wellcome Collection, University of Quebec, Indian Institute of Management, RIAI, RIBA and the House of Lords Select Committee, among many institutions.
3. In what ways can we advance architectural representation to reflect these findings? 4. How can specialist design knowledge support all stages of building or redesign? 5. How can we build dementia-friendly cities from the outset?
Methodology
1. Dialogues: critical conversations across disciplines from health policy to neuropsychology and with people and carers affected by dementia in the UK and Ireland;
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