 I'm Cathy Treadaway and I'm a Professor of Creative Practice at Cardiff Metropolitan University. I'm one of the researchers in the Caryad Research Group here, and Caryad is the Welsh word for love, but it also stands for the Centre for Applied Research for Inclusive Arts and Design. I'm currently the Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded design for dementia project called LAWF, and we're designing playful objects for people with advanced dementia. The disease impacts on memory, that's what most people think of when they think about dementia, they think about memory loss, but actually dementia encompasses over 100 different diseases and each one is slightly different and affects different parts of the brain and is manifest in different ways, and so you're dealing with a problem that's very, very complicated. We try and address that issue by working with people who are experts in dementia and that might be the person living with dementia themselves, so we try and work very, very closely with them and make what we do highly personalised. We work with the carers because they know these individuals intimately and they know what the difficulties are. Dementia impacts heavily on communication and in the advanced stages of the disease people become very, very withdrawn and find great difficulty in communicating with their loved ones and with carers, and so finding ways that are going to bring joy, happiness, contentment, reduce anxiety and agitation are the key things that we're looking to do. So we've been working on projects involving advanced dementia for the last five years and the LAWF project is the most recent of a number of projects that have been looking at sensory stimulation and how to support the well-being of people with advanced dementia. Currently there are very few products on the market that help support people with advanced dementia partly because it's a difficult area in which to design for and also it's very difficult for these people to tell us exactly what they would like to have. With some of the things that we've made, the objects that we've made for the LAWF project we've had some quite astounding responses from the people that we've given the objects to. So I think we can say that there are definite benefits to giving people playful objects when they're in the advanced stages of dementia. We really couldn't do any of the work we do without the amazing help that we get from all kinds of different people and they include people who are representatives from the different dementia charities, professional carers and informal carers and family members. We really couldn't do any of this without their contribution. They have the expertise that we as designers need to understand in order to inform the work that we're doing. We've got a terrific team that work here in Carriad, the researchers that work with us on the LAWF project. We've got artists, designers, technologists, electronics experts, computer scientists and each one contributes their expertise to the design process. The way in which we do that is by trying to include as many people as possible in participatory design workshops and we try and make these fun because the project is looking at positive emotion, is looking at fun, joy, pleasure, is looking at play. All these things are very good for your health and well-being and in order to encourage people to help us to understand what people living with advanced dementia might need, we get people to have a laugh, to be creative, to use their hands, to experience what in the moment pleasure feels like for themselves and then help us to understand how that might be used within the design process.