Step Change Design Ltd

6. Garden designers: What’s missing from your site analysis?

Orange Pixel — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:59:05 +0000

A typical site analysis checklist for garden designers, landscape architects and other outside specialists, is likely to include: site orientation, soil condition and pH, existing plants, client’s wish list…and much more. However, when it comes to organisational settings, like care homes, do you consider assessing the organisation’s culture, i.e. its current practices, attitudes and values […]

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5: Overcome the Fear and Become a Person-centred Setting

Orange Pixel — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 09:38:22 +0000

We saw during our study and in our wider work how engagement with outdoor spaces acts like a mirror of the care organisation’s underlying care culture. Attitudes towards risk reveal a great deal about any fears that may be holding back or inhibiting staff stepping into the garden or encouraging residents to do so, as […]

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4: No Questions Asked: Legacy of Fear

Debbie — Tue, 06 May 2025 09:46:25 +0000

Because fear is not seen as a desirable trait professionally, it can often be subtle and well disguised across an organisation’s practices and procedures. And yet it is a perfectly normal human emotion. In care practices this can manifest in different ways in relation to engaging with the garden: putting off decisions about installing new […]

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3. Really useful garden features: Our Anti-Gimmick Checklist

Debbie — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:56:03 +0000

We are often asked what is the quintessential item to include in a care home or dementia garden. The truth is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ as far as garden features are concerned. Instead, we prefer to focus on helping care settings avoid adding, no doubt with good intentions, elements that can […]

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2. Why Stepping Outside is an Inside Job

Debbie — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:52:31 +0000

This blog introduces some of the key evidence-based factors on what may be holding a care setting back from engaging their residents more actively with their outside space. Based on our extensive research project into what makes for actively used dementia and care home gardens, here we focus on the often subtle and subconscious resistances […]

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1. Demystifying stepping into the garden

Debbie — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:44:57 +0000

There are a range of commonly held myths and phrases we hear about why gardens cannot be used in care settings; here we explore some and help you step past them! “But I’m not a gardener, I don’t know what to do out there!” Have you ever heard this phrase used to explain the reason […]

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