Florence Project: Community

The Florence Project is guided by lived experience experts. These are people living with dementia and care partners of people living with dementia.

People can get involved in the project by:

Joining the lived experience expert reference group;
Participating in research projects;
Attending events or reading updates about the research.

More about the Florence Community:

The lived experience expert reference group

Throughout the project, people living with dementia and care partners have guided our focus and decisions. They are:

Part of our design team as we create technologies;
Consulted to help with decisions in our studies;
Also authors and presenters as we share our research.

Work with the lived experience expert reference group has helped develop new technologies and new ways of doing research about technology.

We use a co-design approach that is flexible, responsive and strengths-based.

This means we make sure our ways of working are accessible and make sense, we make changes based on the feedback we receive, and our lived experience experts apply their skills and strengths to the research. Everyone can take on a different role.

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Communication and technology: Brief Introduction Resources

The Florence Project designs research and technology with people living with dementia and their care partners, as living experience experts in multidisciplinary team. Partnering in research and technology, the team identifies key needs and ways of working towards them.

One need identified by the living experience expert reference group was to introduce key issues related to dementia to the general public.

The group identified wanting to create short resources to increase awareness and share perspectives on:

Communication changes related to dementia
How to communicate well with people living with dementia
How technology may help people living with dementia

These areas were identified as particularly important, and areas where myths and misunderstandings existed.

Two living experience experts: Bobby Redman and Natalie Ive shared their perspectives and crafted the content along with Jacki Liddle (occupational therapist, researcher), Peter Worthy (interaction designer, researcher), Anthony Angwin (speech pathologist, researcher), Janet Wiles (Professor in Human Centred Computing) and Dan Angus (Professor of Digital Communications).

We hope you enjoy the resources – which serve to be a brief introduction – the very start of learning about these issues. We would love to hear about how you have used and shared these resources. Get in touch!

About the resources

The resources were conceptualised and created with Inkahoots.
The videos used moving typography and shapes to help share some of the effortful, overwhelming and confusing experiences that can be part of communication for people living with dementia.
Important feedback from our team members indicated the need to also create a version of the video where the experience is not overwhelming and the messages can be clearly heard.

Two versions of each video have therefore been created – a high stimulus, and lower stimulus version. A written downloadable version is also available to make sharing easier.