Expanding the Concept of Personhood: Towards a Posthumanist Approach to Designing for Dementia

Abstract

Abstract Kitwood’s concept of personhood in dementia, as a morally charged and intersubjective state, profoundly influences dementia care. We review selected papers from the archived Dementia Lab Conferences of 2019, 2021, and 2022 to examine how researchers apply Kitwood’s concept in designing for dementia. We conclude that current approaches drawing on Kitwood’s framework overlook the role of the material world in shaping personhood and lack a solid theoretical basis for designing configurations of human and non-human actors in dementia care. To address this gap, we diffractively read Kitwood’s concept of personhood through posthumanist theories and demonstrate how personhood and dementia are constituted in relational processes involving people living with dementia and their human and non-human networks. We emphasize the responsibilities of designers in (re-)configuring these relational networks through technological and design interventions and advocate for participatory and speculative methods to co-create socio-material systems that configure”good care.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.