Designers and Outside Specialists

Relationship-Centred Design for Garden Designers

Our range of support is focused on helping you to identify the current care culture at a setting, the key obstacles to engaging outside more, and matching your support to this and ensuring it can evolve over time as their culture and engagement levels increase. We call this approach ‘Relationship Centred Design’ and below are a range of ways we can help in the order you may find most beneficial.

‘Why don’t we go into the garden?’ series of publications and tools

These books, posters and tools provide detailed insights from our research and how to apply the learning to both garden designers and your care clients and to understand when physical changes may be needed.

These publications are visually engaging, easy to use by any member of care teams, and are brought to life with real examples and experiences within care and dementia home gardens and from us as designers actively working in this field.

The three publications create a resources pack to supports your work and that of your care clients. They can help you as follows:

• ‘A Designer Handbook for Creating Actively Used Care Setting Gardens’ – Tools and insights to support you in understanding and capturing information around organisational culture and to guide you on the most appropriate support to provide your client throughout the garden design process.

• ‘The Care Culture Map & Handbook’ – this provides a deep dive into care culture and its influence on engaging outside and can be used to plan the changes required both to the culture and in the care garden itself. This is intended as a culture change tool for care managers to use over time and can ensure they are able to articulate their actual needs and appropriate design support needed alongside any changes to care practices.

• An A3 ‘Infographic poster’ – perfect for notice boards with evidence based insights, and statistics, to encourage some easy changes to improve engagement outside. It can be a conversation starter supporting communication to any future changes to the garden.

For more details and a look inside the books visit our shop.

It’s ground breaking insightful work. You have really understood the complexity and realities of the sector and broken this down into a digestible and useful format for best practice and a ladder for implementing change. Truly amazing!

Hayley Hughes

Plantology Landscape Architect Practice

Consultations & design work

Every care setting is unique and they are often complex and intense work environments where it can be hard to understand all that is going on. Our experience across many care environments, including dementia care homes, can help you in understanding what is truly influencing engagement outside and how best to support your care clients .

We can support you in the early stages, and beyond, of a potential care garden design project to:

understand the current care culture at a setting
identifying quick wins to increasing engagement outside
understand any aspects of care practices your care client may need to address before, or alongside, any physical changes
establish the nature of support for you to provide to match the current care culture and understand how this may need to evolve over time
advise on implementing a ‘Relationship-Centred Design’ approach to your support

We can provide this in a range of ways to suit a specific job, whether as an ad hoc consultation or by coming alongside you throughout the life of a design. Get in touch to find out more.

Training & Presentations

Our garden design workshop supports you in creating actively used spaces within care homes and other organisational settings. Our evidence based events are, highly interactive and story led with plenty of opportunity to explore your own experiences.

We explore a range of hidden dangers that we, as designers, can inadvertently introduce further hindering engagement outside. Our detailed exploration of ‘Relationship-Centred Design’ supports you in applying this into your working practices.

We can deliver this workshop to design practices, professional groups and within landscape design courses.

We are also available as speakers for garden design conferences and educational settings within the landscape design sector and in support of your on-going continuing professional development. These are often thought provoking presentations remembered long after the event. Get in touch to find out more.

I found your workshop so helpful and although I already had an understanding about your work, this gave me a deeper insight and also allowed me to see more fully how the care map could be used. I am going to promote the use of this as a first step, when consulting with care settings on any major re-designs….. I think the use of the map can be useful first step in assessment of where care settings sit and working out what steps they can make to change their culture before any physical re-designs are started.

Lucy James

Gardening Services Manager, MHA

SGD Dementia Garden Design workshop Feb15 (13c)

Self-help Library of Resources

Our Blogs share insights into some of the common areas hindering engagement with care home gardens and the considerations to improving this whether through care practices or design changes.

Our Download page contains many articles providing insights on our research and the following maybe be particularly helpful:

The Care Home Environment Vol 1 – provides a detailed overview of our findings and its impact on designers
Journal of Dementia Care series of three articles – containing our full research project findings
National Activity Providers Association (NAPA) series of five articles – containing more practical insights to share with care setting clients