Department of Care
Monday 1 February – Saturday 13 February 2016, 12-6pm
NewBridge Project Space
The Department of Care was a collaboration between three PhD researchers at Northumbria University’s School of Design. Daniel Carey, Robert Djaelani, and Paul Emmerson each consider the question “How can we make health and social care better?”
At a time when demand for the NHS, local authority, and charitable services is higher than ever, their funding is being repeatedly slashed. There is an urgent need for innovative solutions to the myriad problems we currently face, as well as those we will face in the future. How can these services be improved when additional investment is no longer available?
The Department of Care offered a public space to address the most pressing issues faced by formal and informal support networks in the North East.
We invited all interested parties – carers, patients, artists, social workers, healthcare professionals, and the general public – to come to the exhibition and join in the production of collaborative and innovative responses to these issues.
Biographies
Daniel Carey is a former lawyer now pursuing his PhD research in collaboration with Newcastle Carers. This charity, based in Byker, provides emotional and practical support to people who provide unpaid, informal care for friends and family who have physical disabilities and/or mental disorders. Daniel is researching whether innovative and disruptive design approaches can improve the systems of support available to informal carers in the region.
Robert Djaelani works with the North Tyneside Arts Studio (NTAS), a service offering space for a selected group of artists from the region. The studio has a focus on improving the health and wellbeing of its artists through various workshops and activities that run during the week. Robert’s research considers how design can help NTAS’s users create their own spaces for support, and how these design techniques can impact on the wider community.
Paul Emmerson’s research invites citizens in Newcastle to constitute local groups to practice a form of design termed Design-as-Civics to envision and enable positive futures: asking how do we facilitate the ‘good life’ for all? The principle is to explore the value of ‘fairness between citizens’ using metaphor to ‘aim’ change to redress societies ’wicked problems’ – issues such as health – through their social practice of design.
