Step Change Design is a design and consultancy practice that aims to promote a new approach to to enable care settings to increase engagement levels for residents, particularly those living with a dementia, with their outside spaces. Our aim is to share the key findings from our large scale research project, and to promote a new approach to how design support is delivered with care setting clients
we call ‘Relationship-Centred Design’. We are two Garden Designers, Debbie Carroll and Mark Rendell, who set out to answer a deceptively simple question, “Why aren’t care home gardens more actively used?” As designers, we were concerned that a lot of money was being spent by often cash-strapped care organisations on a new garden, in the belief that it would encourage more use of the outdoors, when this didn’t seem to be happening in practice. Our self-funded research projec threw up some unexpected and often subtle practices at work across the care sector. We discovered the answers to our original question and this was that active engagement with the outside spaces around care settings is related to care cultural practices inside the care setting. The higher performing care settings (in terms of person-centred and relationship-centred care practices) were engaging residents with their gardens more actively, regardless of how pretty these spaces were or whether or not they had been designed. We have been writing articles and blogs following publication of our 'Care Culture Map & Handbook' tool. We have presented at Conferences organised by NAPA, Journal for Dementia Care (UK Dementia Congress), Eden Alternatives, Landscape Show and other events explaining our findings, our diagnostic tool, the Map, and our key messages that it is care culture that ultimately determines how actively used the outside space will be. We are keen to share these insights and findings with as wide an audience as possible across the Care sector and also with designers and outdoor specialists, so that investment in the outside spaces around care settings (and what takes place there) will be cost-effective and result in gardens that are well-used and well-loved by their residents. In the care sector, we are now fairly well known as culture change advocates as much as designers while in the Design sector we are promoting a new way to deliver our design support to ensure it is appropriate and effective for the long term. You can read a selection of our articles to date on our website. We are keen to join other agencies and networks both in the UK and beyond in important debates around care culture and and its influence on creating and using the outside spaces around care settings.
