Introduction:
“Understanding the behavior and symptoms of a dementia patient- what does it feel like to lose your memory in the present?” This is the research area I have chosen to explore for this mini project. Some projects that have covered memory loss and dementia I found were an infinite runner game known as “Alz” which creates a sense of disorientation in everyday life for a person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The part I really liked about this game was the visual aesthetic; the game glitches throughout which is very disorientating for the user but it is showing the user what the person suffering from Alzheimer memory is like. Another media project I found was a picture book that documented a group of dementia patients and their partners who meet at an allotment and share stories about their own dementia stories and photos from their past. The book called “An allotment of time” was produced by the Alzheimer’s society which is a charity that helps families coping with Alzheimer disease. I like the images shown in the book; one that sticks out to me is on page 11 and the quote says “This photograph takes me back, but who’s he.” This shows how a person suffering from the illness can recognize things from their past but they can’t pin point who exactly they are remembering or themselves. There is a film about memory loss called “Momento” that is fascinating in how they stitched together the narrative for the user; it is both frustrating and uncomfortable the way the strands of narrative gets to a certain point and jumps back to the start of the day again where the main character wakes up in a hotel room trying to recall every thing he knows about the people around him. I really like how they used polaroid pictures to help the main character remember faces and information about them. There is also a film called “Still Alice” which is about a middle aged women who has been diagnosed with the early stages of Dementia and it documents a diary Alice keeps everyday to help her remember things to live independently with the illness. I like the idea of the diary she keeps in the film and I really like how there is a part in the diary that says if there is ever a day I wake up and I can’t remember these three things then I need to start asking for help. I think it is important and it shows her living her life as normal as possible but she herself has created a boundary for herself that when her illness deteriorates to a point that she knows she can and will ask for help.
My proposal for this project is create an interactive diary web page which is aimed at users who do not suffer from dementia to be put in the position of a person with dementia to get them to understand the confusion, disorientation and frustration they go through as a result of memory loss. I will note that I in no way intend to created a solution to cure the illness nor do I intend to create a tool for dementia sufferers themselves. I simply want to open up the users eyes to give them a sense of what these people are going through everyday and hopefully make them feel some empathy towards them. The working artifact should resemble a notebook and it will include interactive elements for the user to engage with in order to disorientate them and make them feel like they are the person with the illness while they navigate the page. The interactive elements will include a diary entry in the form of a kinetic typography video to resemble the diary entries from the film Still Alice, hoverable images to resemble the Polaroids used in the film Momento, drag and drop elements to remind them not to forget everyday items such as keys, phone and purse. The aesthetic of the diary should be a glitch like in the game Alz to disorientate the user. Once the project build is complete I plan to conduct some user testing and feedback session to gather the thoughts of the user to see if the research topic was interpreted as predicted and intended. I will also document the making of the project by a production log found in the studio practice page.
This is the finished Interactive Diary:
To download the Project file Click Here or the Image above
IMAP 