Spending Time: Co-Designing a Personalized Calendar at the Care Center.

This paper reports on a full iteration from a project with an older adult, P, residing at a 24hour Danish care center for adults with acquired brain damage. P has due to a cognitive impairment severe challenges in remembering planned activities, which requires a substantial need for staff to remind him round the clock, thus leading to further dependency on staff and lack of self-determination. Grounded in Participatory Design, thereby taking into account P’s and staff members’ situated problems, a planning system was designed together with P and prototyped with the MEAN-stack implemented on a Raspberry Pi. The prototype was then deployed over two periods (one week and three months) to be evaluated with P and staff members in its real context. Findings demonstrate how reciprocity ensured commitment and additional knowledge about the problem-field. The evaluations of the prototype revealed the importance of staff cooperation for system integration but also showed how the prototype enabled new meaningful social routines to form for both the co-designing resident and staff. Thus, the paper sheds light on the many mechanics embedded when embarking on design work, which goes full circle within a Scandinavian healthcare context.