Care and Design: An Ethnography of Mutual Recognition in the Context of Advanced Dementia

While there have been considerable developments in designing for dementia within HCI, there is still a lack of empirical understanding of the experience of people with advanced dementia and the ways in which design can support and enrich their lives. In this paper, we present our findings from a long-term ethnographic study, which aimed to gain an understanding of their lived experience and inform design practices for and with people with advanced dementia in residential care. We present our findings using the social theory of recognition as an analytic lens to account for recognition in practice and its challenges in care and research. We discuss how we, as the HCI community, can pragmatically engage with people with advanced dementia and propose a set of considerations for those who wish to design for and with the values of recognition theory to promote collaboration, agency and social identity in advanced dementia care.