Architecture & Design for Aged and Dementia Care

When we design for ageing, we design for dementia – because at it’s best, architecture for dementia is vibrant, generous and forgiving: the things we feel we’ve earned after a long and full life!

We have extraordinary credentials for aged and dementia care design because our principal registered architect, Dr Golembiewski has shown leadership in this space for years. He is on the Expert Reference Group for Dementia Training Australia and is a lead author for the 2020 Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) Knowledge Report, alongside some of the best-known experts in the world. ADI is an official World Health Organisation partner, and represents the federation of all national dementia organisations and the 2020 paper will be on international guidance on designing the built environment for people with dementia.

We start out by encompassing dementia-care design as part of design for older people because people should be able to let the years pass in place even if their cognitive abilities decline. The most important decision-makers in these home-environments should be those people who live there. That is; those who will eventually age, those who have dementia, their families and their carers, because people are the experts of their own lives.

It’s easy to get caught up in systems, routines and policies when it comes to design for dementia. But it’s the fine-grain, day-to-day experience of life that matters most. And for people on the ground, that all too often means the realities posed by the social and physical environments, where little frustrations compound to become resentments and even trigger symptoms. These cause further decline into illness, they add to the burden of family and carers, and inevitably dig deeper into the budgets of the social structures that are responsible.

Psychological Design are experts in architecture for dementia - we use a very powerful sociological method for designing for people as they age, called Salutogenesis - read more here. In practice salutogenic design means embodying care into the very structure of the built environment. It means designing environments that are supportive in any number of ways – physically, emotionally and cognitively.