How Do I; creating tailored solutions for people living with dementia

Posted on: 05/06/2019

Design Foundations funding helped “How Do I?” use human centred design techniques to create individualised solutions for those living with dementia.

Through the Innovate UK Design Foundations programme in 2017, £4 million of funding was awarded to 93 businesses of varying sizes. The objective was helping businesses work with designers to identify innovation opportunities and find viable routes to market.

This insight series selects several of those projects to highlight a variety of design approaches.  As a company dedicated to helping people learn how do things using mobile technology, How do I? developed a project called Living Well to improve the lives of people living with dementia. With the help of the Design Foundations funding they teamed up with design agency Humanly and, together, they set about designing, prototyping and testing appropriate learning tools.

The early research determined that people living with dementia have highly individualised needs therefore their ambition to ‘design for people with dementia’ didn’t make sense.  The persona building exercise was too generic for people living with dementia so they started co-creating solutions with clients on a one-to-one basis.

Taryl Law, Co-Founder of How Do I said, “There is a common misconception that designers just bring the solution to life towards the end of the product development. In fact, it works best when they are there from the start to establish insight. How often do people get together with a designer to solve a problem without already having a solution in mind?”

Find out how How Do I used early stage design to identify what their target market wanted in their case study here.

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