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Insights & Solutions

Tool
March 2020 Tool

Understanding the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, especially those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, better equips design teams to create supportive care and living spaces. Changes that can be credited to dementia are noticeably different from the changes typical of normal aging, but both can occur at the same time. 

Design Strategies
March 2020 Design Strategies

Understanding the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, especially those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, better equips design teams to create supportive living spaces. Devising goals that target single symptoms and objectives is not always practical, however, because changes associated with aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias tend to appear in “clusters” rather than in isolation. The design-based evidence associated with designing supportive memory care settings results in 12 programmatic design strategies.

Executive Summary
February 2020 Executive Summary

Learn about: the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, including those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, how thoughtful design can reduce stress associated with declining physical abilities, memory loss, and care provision.

Webinar
June 2018 Webinar

This webinar explores how the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pursued a vision to develop a new pediatric patient care unit: one that would meet the requirements and licensure of an acute care unit, but would provide a safe and supportive environment for patients with a comorbid developmental, behavioral, or psychiatric diagnosis. 

Interview
February 2018 Interview

Learn about how the design of a new psychiatric facility strives to normalize mental illness through carefully chosen materials with the goal of creating a “homey,” non-institutional setting, why private patient rooms will be included in the new final building as an important part of the design concept, and how research helped shape the architects’ beliefs that the built environment should support patients’ dignity and independence as part of the recovery process.