Frederique Albert-Bordenave

Aisha Fouad

Niels Hendriks

Insight series #7, A dementia friendly neighbourhood

Insight Series #8, Hacking Healthcare

Project/boek Hacking Healthcare, Rietveld/VU/UVA, insight series #8 Designing Amsterdam’s Future Healthcare. A collaboration between Pakhuis de Zwijger, students from psychology, medicine and social studies of the University of Amsterdam/VU University and the Inter-Architecture department of the Rietveld Academie. This book is about our Hacking Healthcare experiment. Hacking Healthcare is an educational project designed to address some of the many challenges our healthcare system is currently facing. For example, how can a psychiatric ward become more human, while ensuring high quality and safe care? Or how could we design our care environments in such a way that demented elderly are simulated to move more? As today’s healthcare challenges become more complex and multifaceted, we cannot solely rely on our default way of attacking problems anymore. We need not only specialist knowledge of healthcare professionals, but also the ability to observe, emphasize, and create. Therefore, in Hacking Healthcare, future healthcare professionals from the University of Amsterdam and future artists and designers from the department of Inter-Architecture of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie were brought together to solve some of Amsterdam’s challenges in healthcare. In this book you will find their problem analyses, solutions, and reflection on the process they went through. We hope that, with their stories, we give you insight into what such a process could look like and maybe even inspire you to design something you find important. Renske Kroeze and Tim van de Grift (UVA) Henri Snel (Inter-Architecture, Gerrit Rietveld Academie)

The new book Insight series #7, a dementia friendly neigbourhood With the first dementia friendly newspaper in the Netherlands ‘Twenty years of research has still yielded no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Where’s the holdup?’ Says de Volkskrant newspaper dated February 8, 2014. ‘Eighty thousand people with dementia are living by themselves’ reported the NRC Handelsblad on October 5, 2013. ‘The Netherlands are awaiting an explosive growth in the number of dementia patients between the age of 50 and 60. This is largely due to an unhealthy lifestyle.’ This is the expectation of four professors at the VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam. This is the kind of messages we hear and read regularly in the media. It is only when you are intimately familiar with dementia, that it touches you. From my own experience I can say that Alzheimer’s is terrible, perhaps even degrading. Especially a debit card at the ATM where you’ve been waiting in line? My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, sometimes bought a loaf of bread from the bakery up to 5 times per day while she was still living independently. Too bad that the baker did not openly wonder if that was not a lot for a single household. Fortunately, the government has announced 32.5 million Euros in additional spending over the coming four years to improve the in-home care for people suffering from dementia. The money will go to the Deltaplan Dementia, to provide more scientific research into better treatment, cure and prevention of dementia. Secretary of State Martin van Rijn from the Health department has this to say about it: “as long as it is not possible to cure dementia, we must make the disease as bearable as possible for the patients, family and caregivers. Besides fundamental research into the causes and symptoms we can improve the care.” Henri Snel, Head of inter-architecture, Gerrit Rietveld Academie

Bin Xu