In December 2015, Níall McLaughlin Architects and Yeoryia Manolopoulou contacted us to design the website for the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016, attempting to understand and improve the spatial experience of dementia sufferers.
Under the title Losing Myself, we were given a brief to develop an online platform to collect, archive and present research material that emerges during the architectural design and research process around the topic of dementia. This may take the form of text, video and audio files, and is to be divided into the respective categories. The target audience of the website was to be architecture professionals as well as people interested in the topic of dementia for other reasons, or – albeit to a smaller proportion – patients affected by dementia themselves. We therefore focused on developing a website equally accessible to users with widely differing levels of familiarity with the use of computers.
In a peculiar way, working for the Venice Biennale carries an obligation to the new. In this case the challenge lied in the tension between a conceptual acknowledgement of the workings of the mind of a dementia sufferer – negotiating the world relying on temporal and spatial fragments his or her mind randomly happens to make available – and facilitating the navigation of the site as far as ever possible.
During our design development, we had the chance to meet neuroscientist and dementia specialist Sebastian Crutch from UCL. In the course of our conversation, it became clear that there was no ‘one size fits all’ approach to create a dementia friendly site, as symptoms vary widely. However, we encountered an objective that seemed worth pursuing when enquiring about the social implications that accompany the condition. As the condition progresses, people with dementia may lose the ability to participate in tasks that others in society take for granted. This can lead to frustration, all too often accompanied by an auto-imposed avoidance strategy, resulting from a fear of failure and further intimidation. This can lead people with dementia to retreat from public life and become socially isolated, which further reinforces their fear.
Therefore, the design of this website represents an attempt to create a space where each move, or click, yields a positive result. We tried to develop a site which maximises ease of use, and simultaneously minimises the possibility of error. Navigation to the categories is invited via a number of icons that should suggest their significants through long term memory references. For those to whom categories as such already induce an intimidating prospect of failure, we have included a browsing mode, called ‘everything’, displaying a random selection of entries with no underlying structure that needs to be grasped. For further accessibility the text is set in a moderately increased font size, and the colour ways provide a contrast that is slightly lower than black on white. In case of clicking on a dead link (Error 404) the user is redirected to the homepage, no error page is displayed.
As such we hope to provide a space to the design team working on the Irish pavilion that allows them to reach the wide variety of their envisaged audience, a ‘error-free’ space that can be navigated both by proficient internet users, as well as by the fragmented minds affected by dementia, which are so hard for us to understand.
by Marco and Axel
PS
This project has not been concluded. We will continue to test the site with dementia sufferers and make improvements during the Biennale and beyond. In such a first test, carried out in February at UCL with one patient and her carer, the only major difficulty the lady encountered was to read out the names of Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou. How could you blame her for this?