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American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias logoLink to American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias
. 2010 Feb;25(1):74–89. doi: 10.1177/1533317509333039

Designing Leisure Products for People With Dementia: Developing ‘‘the Chitchatters’’ Game

Helma van Rijn 1, Joost van Hoof 2, Pieter Jan Stappers 3
PMCID: PMC10845697  PMID: 19346500

Abstract

Providing leisure to people with dementia is a serious challenge, for health care professionals and designers and engineers of products used for activity sessions. This article describes the design process of ‘‘the Chitchatters,’’ a leisure game for a group of people with dementia in day care centers. The game aims to stimulate social interaction among people with dementia. Different stakeholders, such as older adults with dementia, their relatives and care professionals were involved in the design process via qualitative research methods as participant observation and the use of probes. These methods were applied to give the design team insight into the experiential world of people with dementia. This article presents how design insights from practice and literature can be translated into a real design for a leisure product for group use by older people with dementia, and shows designers how to work with, and design for, special groups.

Keywords: participatory design, design process, Montessori, leisure, participant observation, experiences, interaction, dementia, probes

Full Text

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Contributor Information

Helma van Rijn, ID-StudioLab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands, h.vanrijn@tudelft.nl .

Joost van Hoof, Research Centre for Innovation in Health Care, Research Group Demand Driven care, Faculty of Health Care, Hogeschool Utrecht, Bolognalaan 101, 3584 CJ Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Pieter Jan Stappers, ID-StudioLab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands.

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