This paper explores the integration of co-design and art-making in developing technologies that support personhood in dementia care. While technologies for dementia care have advanced, there remains a gap in creating solutions that are directly informed by the experiences of people living with dementia and support their individuality. In collaboration with the specialist arts organisation Bright Shadow CIO, our work involves engaging people living with dementia in the design process. Over five weeks of co-design sessions, 44 participants worked alongside artists to craft four physical boxes that represent “meaningful places.” The physical boxes were then transformed into VR environments, allowing participants to immerse themselves in and interact with their creations from a first-person perspective. Our findings demonstrate that VR alone is insufficient in dementia care. For VR to be meaningful, it must be be part of a broader intervention that includes trust-building, sensory engagement, and creative involvement. Within this process, art-making serves as both a method and medium, providing a means of self-expression and connection to identity. Our findings challenge conventional approaches to dementia-focused VR, advocating for a shift toward inclusive and care-driven technology design.

One factor leading to compromised Quality of Life (QoL) for people with dementia in long-term care settings is the significant barriers they face in accessing experiences beyond their physical premises. Although, in recent years, research within HCI has investigated the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in providing enriched experiences for people with dementia, few studies have looked into the practical issues relating to integrating and deploying VR into care settings and how in-depth understanding of such issues can inspire VR design for dementia care. Considering the perspective of key stakeholders, we demonstrate VR’s potential to create a rich conversation space with family members, preserve the identity and personhood of people with dementia through VR, and consider organisational issues of VR deployment in care settings. As such, this paper contributes to the HCI research community with future design directions to enhance the deployment and adoption of VR in dementia care settings.