By Kristina Niedderer, Geke Ludden, Tom Dening, Vjera Holthoff-Detto

This edited volume offers the first overview and reflective discussion of how design can contribute to people’s wellbeing and mental health in the context of dementia, mental illness and neurodiversity.

This book explores and promotes holistic, salutogenic and preventive strategies that recognise and respond to people’s needs, wants, wishes and rights to further health, wellbeing and equality. Bringing together years of experience as designers and clinicians, the contributors to the book emphasise how design can be a collaborative, creative process as well as an outcome of this process, and they reveal how this is guided by mental health and design policy. Through its three parts, the book explores themes of ethics, citizenship and power relationships in co-design, providing an overview of current developments and approaches in co-design; of the culturally and value sensitive adaptation of design interventions and their applications, many of which are a result of co-design; and of policy and related standards in and for design and mental health. In this way, the book demonstrates how design can help to support people, their care partners and care professionals in promoting mental health and wellbeing, and it offers a rich resource on how to create a sustainable future for care in this domain.

The book provides a unique and holistic overview and resource for designers, researchers, students, policy providers and health and care professionals to help support the development and adoption of person-centred design processes and interventions.