I’m interested in/inspired by…
The area of eldercare represents a growing part of the Danish populace that in my opinion is marginalized and under funded. Our investigations showed that a lot of steps could be made to improve the daily lives in the elderly homes.
My thesis will take its starting point in an investigation into the life of the elderly stricken with dementia or Alzheimer’s. What is the current treatment that is offered to these people? What is the official strategy to battle this decease and preserve quality of life for those stricken? My goal is to identify the needs of the person/patient and to look into the ways of which more could be done.
Two possible topics:

1. I will use the project “Familiar things” as a case study and if it makes sense after the initial investigation to take this project into the next faze looking at ways of improving / shaping the product.

2. The current medication being offered to Alzheimer patients are doubling their mortality rate. At the same time organizing funerals for elders without kind is a very costly affair for the elderly homes. This road will take a service design oriented approach to the topic.

During my thesis I would like to challenge myself in…
I would like to challenge myself in areas such as graphic design and visualisation. I intent to work with different ways of presenting my data and communicating my ideas using tools such as video prototyping, posters and I will work with GUI where it makes sense. I will further challenge myself into the topics that I am more comfortable with such as ethnography and concept development trying to go as broad as I can before narrowing my focus. If the thesis takes me into product/GUI design I will also be looking into flash programming.

I meet with my thesis councillor Vinay Venkatraman the other day and discussed my thoughts. My idea is to do a deep dive into the life-world of people stricken with Dementia  in the context of the elderly home. At CIID we did a project in GUI design with the elderly home as a venue of research and our team decided to focus on the two diseases mentioned above and memory therapy.

This is to  still the project that moved me the most. In my opinion there is a lot to be done in the area of elderly care and on top of that slowly losing your cognitive abilities along with your identity and dignity has to be one of the worst ways to go. And thus a motivation for doing my thesis project in the context mentioned above. I am hoping to strike up a cooperation with the Danish Elderly home of Sølund located by the lakes in central Copenhagen between Nørrebro and Østerbro and I will also be contacting the research venue from the GUI project, the elderly home of Betania in Frederiksberg. I am very aware that this project will require a very close contact to both people and the elderly home.

Process?
My focus will be on research and organising the subsequent large amount of data transforming it into insights that can be used to develop solutions serving the needs of this group of people. This approach will undoubtedly put a heavy strain on my ability to keep focus and to be able to see patterns in the research but also to recognize the odd ball out or opportunity when it shows it self. Working alone for the first time since first year of university (2001) I will have to develop some kind of method to organize my insights for later reference and simply be able to put something away in order to keep the overview. That is going to be a work in progress!

I will be trying to vigorously document my process since the idea of reconstructing the path of insight often is more storytelling than fact. If anyone feels up to it we can always have a discussion whether or not it is at all possible to “truthfully” reconstruct insight

It is my plan to update this Blog regularly and to share my thoughts and insights. I regard this as being a part of my process but maybe also a part of my method. Time will tell:)