Design Superlatives 2015
“Set of parlour games for elderly dementia sufferers/D9” among award-winning projects
In 2015 the “Set of parlour games for elderly dementia sufferers/D9” project, created in collaboration with RRA LUR/RCKE, was among the recipients of the “Design Superlatives” awards conferred every year by the Designers Society of Slovenia on high-quality design products.
The set of parlour games for elderly dementia sufferers was developed with the aim of strengthening memory and stimulating mental connections via associations and storytelling. This is supposed to alleviate and slow the development of the disease while at the same time ensuring greater social connections among players. The set of games is designed to be used both in the domestic environment and in care homes.
This project combines a finished design solution and work in the fields of design theory and criticism and specialised writing, developed to the working prototype phase by RRA LUR/RCKE in partnership with the Pekinpah Association, Studio Miklavc, design students and various social care institutions. At the same time the lecturers and authors Barbara Predan and Petra Černe Oven succeeded, via a presentation of the project and an article in the conference publication, in including the project in the programme of the Design4Health conference, one of the most important European conferences on the links between health and design that brings together experts from all over the world (including Australia, Japan and the USA).
The “D9” parlour games project has a varied history and actually began in the context of the Ljubljana Creative Camps which the Regional Development Agency of the Ljubljana Urban Region organised as part of the EU project CCALps. We should mention that a further 13 innovative services in the healthcare and sustainable transport fields were developed during the Ljubljana Creative Camps, among them the award-winning mobile app “A to B: Ljubljana”. The unexpected positive dimensions of the Ljubljana Creative Camps were undoubtedly mainly due to the strong cooperative element and the partnership with the Pekinpah Association (Barbara Predan and Petra Černe Oven), combined with ambitious goals, well thought out concepts and the inclusion of a wide range of experts from the very beginning (quality of life consultants Papilot, the Department of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases at Ljubljana University Medical Centre, the Rheumatism Association of Slovenia, public transport operator LPP, etc.).
More about the “Set of parlour games for elderly dementia sufferers/D9” project
Photographs: Franci Virant