In tandem with this year’s Dementia Action Week, which runs from 17-23 May, Dulux Trade has launched the Dulux Trade Occupant Centred Colour and Design (OCCD) hub.
The hub 'showcases industry-leading initiatives, piloted alongside industry partners, furthering ideas around the design of accessible and inclusive environments for care’.
In launching the hub, the business says it is furthering its commitment ‘to provide colour and design support to enable the step-change necessary in the provision of environments for an ageing UK population and supporting people living with dementia’. The new OCCD ‘hub’ was created ‘to inform architects, designers, and specifiers, how expert colour and design application, with the occupant at the heart of the brief, can have a positive impact on wellbeing across a range of sectors, including healthcare and education’.
Dulux Trade said: “A new specialist section on the hub – ‘Designing for Dementia and Aged-Care’ – brings together the ground-breaking work Dulux Trade has undertaken over the years to use design to create optimal environments for dementia care in both healthcare and residential settings.”
To help design professionals improve living spaces for people living with dementia, the hub offers practical safeguarding measures useable in the home or in residential care spaces –
including colour and design advice geared to prevent trips and falls and help with wayfinding. In addition, through use of a personalised colour scheme approach, the hub ‘encourages exploration of ways to promote and preserve self-identity and enhance wellbeing’. A key feature is the Dulux Trade Dementia-Friendly Colour Palette & Design Guide – based on a set of evidence-based design principles, which Dulux Trade has created by undertaking research to explain how careful selection of certain colours, patterns, and materials, can help those living with dementia.
Karen Wilkinson, Marketing lead, said: “Building our Occupant Centred Colour and Design Hub to further support design for dementia and aged care is one of the ways we are supporting the industry to think differently about how design can be harnessed to develop truly inclusive care environments. We’re pleased to be able to provide professionals with a wealth of information to help them create more supportive environments. Ultimately, by combining resources and expertise with other partners such as BRE, we can work towards a common goal to inspire more inclusive built environments that embrace everyone in society.”
In partnership with BRE, BRE Trust, Loughborough University, and interdisciplinary architectural practice, Halsall Lloyd Partnership, Dulux Trade contributed to a dementia demonstration home - ‘Chris and Sally’s House’ – at built environment research, advisory, and testing organisation, BRE’s Watford Innovation Park, which has been adapted to cater for different types and stages of dementia harnessing a variety of special features and assistive technologies.
Dulux Trade also played a key role in a historic project to transform Alexandra Palace’s old BBC Transmitter Hall in London to enable those living with dementia to navigate around it more easily, and was also instrumental in designing dementia care spaces for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, one of England’s largest NHS Trusts, ‘to ensure that the environment was stimulating, welcoming, and comfortable, for patients’.