Lessons from Culture Box
The project team are getting ready to attend the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Social Medicine & Population Health Conference at the University of Exeter. The conference will take place from 6th September to 9th September, with the author of this blog (Dr Chloe Asker) attending the event.
Earlier this year, the project submitted an abstract to present a poster which was accepted. Our poster highlights the lessons learnt from the Culture Box study. These lessons are intended to inform future research on arts-based and creative approaches to dementia. There are four main lessons from our work, including:
These lessons are explored in greater depth in an upcoming book chapter in an edited volume.
We offer 7 main recommendations that hope to inform future arts-based participatory research with people with dementia. They can be read on the poster below:
“Lessons learnt from Culture Box” (Asker et al., 2022)
Design process
We aimed to be accessible as possible when designing the poster. In the research team, there was a general sense that academic posters often are a little lacking in their design choices and colour pallets. Therefore, for us, aesthetic was an important part of poster design and authoring.
The poster is intended to be accessible to people with dementia. When designing the poster using an online design tool called Canva, Chloe endeavoured to display the content in a dementia-friendly way.
We used the Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project’s (DEEP) guide to dementia friendly design. Their advise centres around making information easy to digest, accessibly written (without jargon), aesthetically pleasing, and containing relevant content for people with dementia.
The poster is written and styled in a way that hopes to meet the guidance set out by DEEP. It is, therefore, different to normal academic posters which are often jargon filled, follow a standard graphic design format, and fairly inaccessible to non-academic groups.
However, a crucial part of dementia friendly design is gathering feedback from people with dementia. Due to time scales, this stage could not happen. Future academic design work needs to work in a participatory way to make sure the information is accessible to a range of audiences.