Living Counter-Maps: A Board Game as Critical Design for Relational Communication in Dementia Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dementia disrupts communication not only as a cognitive process but as a relational practice, leaving people living with dementia (PLwD) at risk of exclusion when language fragments. This study examines how communication closeness, the felt sense of being understood, emotionally attuned, and socially connected, might be supported through Research in and through Design (Ri&tD). Drawing on formative mixed-reality studies and a participatory co-design workshop with PLwD, caregivers, and stakeholders, we iteratively developed a series of playful artifacts culminating in Neighbourly, a tactile board game designed to support relational interaction through rule-based, multimodal play. Across this design genealogy, prototypes were treated as Living Counter-Maps: participatory mappings that made patterns of gesture, rhythm, shared attention, and material engagement visible and discussable. Through iterative interpretation and synthesis, the study identifies three guiding principles for designing for communication closeness: supporting co-regulation rather than correction, enabling multimodal reciprocity, and providing a shared material focus for joint agency. The paper consolidates these insights in the Living Counter-Maps Framework, which integrates counter-mapping and Ri&tD as a methodological approach for studying and designing relational communication in dementia care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".