Wychwood Festival

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CARIAD members recently ran a series of Hand i Pocket ‘funshops’ at the Wychwood Festival (3rd – 5th June 2016).  These sessions offered visitors to the festival the opportunity to get creative and make a sensory textile ‘Hand i Pocket’ for someone with late stage dementia.  A Hand i Pocket is a stitched textile pocket that looks colourful, is interesting to touch and comforting to feel that will stimulate and amuse someone with late stage dementia.

Working with Age Cymru and Dementia & Imagination (Bangor Univeristy) at the festival, CARIAD’s Funshops were a great success with many pockets made.

Hand i Pocket Funshops are a global community network making textiles for people with dementia. More information about Hand i Pockets can be found at: www.laughproject.info or www.handsproject.info

CARIAD dementia research with Gwalia Mynydd Mawr

Bill and Elaine for web

Residents from Gwalia Mynydd Mawr were joined by Prof Cathy Treadaway and the CARIAD dementia research team for a celebration Tea Party on Sunday 22nd November at the care home in Tumble near Llanelli. The event was held to celebrate the handover of a number of textiles that were developed as part of the Sensor e-Textile design for dementia research at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Continue reading CARIAD dementia research with Gwalia Mynydd Mawr

Professorial Lecture – Making a Difference: Designing for Happiness

Design is about people; the better able designers are to understand their needs, the easier it is to create appropriate solutions to support them. Using practical participatory approaches, in which people are kept at the heart of the process, it is possible to gain insights into human experience and then design positively to promote human flourishing and enhance wellbeing. Continue reading Professorial Lecture – Making a Difference: Designing for Happiness

Arts & Humanities Research Council fund design research for dementia

Cardiff Metropolitan University’s CARIAD research centre has just been awarded an AHRC research grant of £500,000 over three years for its work in designing for people with dementia.

The LAUGH (Ludic Artefacts Using Gesture and Haptics) project is an international collaboration with researchers at the University of Technology Sydney and Birmingham City University and is led by Professor Cathy Treadaway from Cardiff School of Art and Design.

This international research collaboration addresses the call by the WHO and the G8 nations for international collaboration in order to address the global challenge of the ageing population.

The research is being partnered by Gwalia Cyf, one of the largest providers of residential social care in Wales, and will bring together people with dementia, their carers and a range of health professionals, technologists and designers. The work is also supported by the leading charities in the field: Age Cymru- My Home Life, Alzheimer’s Society and Dementia Positive.

The LAUGH research project will develop innovative playful devices that amuse, distract, comfort, engage, bring joy, and promote ‘in the moment’ living for people with late stage dementia.  It builds on wellbeing research that shows that happy people live longer, have fewer falls and require less medication. It will propose non-pharmacological approaches to improve the wellbeing of people with dementia and their care. Continue reading Arts & Humanities Research Council fund design research for dementia

Breaking Bread Christmas Special a success!

DSC00790A special festive thank you to all our participants who attended our Breaking Bread Christmas Special at Chapter Arts House this Friday. The team hosted their second official workshop and in partnership with the Trinity Project, Splott, Cathays Community Centre and the Dalton Street Centre. We were part funded by the Tesco Charity Trust which enabled us to host a truly special workshop. Focusing on the mobility of the service we set up in a ‘white space’ with an oven hired from M&M Catering Wales. The recipe was a simple cinnamon loaf divided into mini tins for sharing. We also provided icing materials to let the group add festival decorations.

DSC00808The workshop focused on testing what was possible with very limited facilities, cooking times with a hire oven, health and safety, practical issues, as well as continuing to establish key links with Community Services and key protagonists across South Wales. The degree of ‘sharing’ provided by the workshop and the possibilites to connect with people in creative and exciting ways was also monitored.

A massive thank you to everybody who helped make the event possible, Happy Christmas from the team and looking forward to seeing everybody in the new year for more events and workshops.

Leah connects with Communities First Clusters across Cardiff

Continue reading Leah connects with Communities First Clusters across Cardiff

CARIAD presents at CEWN showcase event in Trefforest

664801_origThanks to the Creative Exchange Wales Network for hosting their latest showcase event, experts from industry, Welsh Government and the BBC attended to give advice and support recent projects.

Leah presented on several of her projects which have received CEWN support, including iMagine, Breaking Bread and ProFoundCoding. She spoke of scaling up plans for Breaking Bread and the video tagging project in progress, aiming to improve teachers understanding of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. More details about the event can be viewed here.

 

 

Daniel Marshall wins prestigious Elektra Award

Congratulations to recent Cardiff Met graduate Daniel Marshall for winning the rising star award at the prestigious Elektra Awards in London last week.

20140812_154858Daniel worked with CARIAD on his award winning Empathy project – designing for children with autism. The full project can be seen on his website.

Daniel impressed the panel with his enthusiasm, originality and overall commitment to designing for real
people and real world problems! Well done Daniel and best of luck for the future, we hope to work with you again!