Dementia-Friendly Community

An approach to inclusion in which public spaces, services, programs, and technologies are designed so that people living with dementia can continue to participate as active community members - shopping, using transport, attending cultural venues, socialising - alongside their care partners. Dementia-friendly work pushes past the medical model toward interdependence: the goal is not only that an individual can manage a task but that the surrounding community sustains their participation. Designers should be aware that 'carer-friendly' and 'dementia-friendly' are distinct, and that labelling a space as dementia-specific can itself be exclusionary by marking it as other.