Hand i Pocket® Funshops

Professor Cathy Treadaway, CARIADctreadaway@cardiffmet.ac.uk

Hand i Pocket® Funshops are participatory events in which participants are encouraged to make textile objects (pockets) and activities (to go inside the pocket) for people living with advanced dementia. Carers, family and friends, health care professionals and the general public are brought together in an informal and playful way, in order to participate creatively in the design and making process. The research aim of Hand i Pockets is to develop sustainable, replicable design processes that can be used by non-creative professionals to create sensory textiles for individuals with dementia, to support their wellbeing.

The rationale behind the development of this methodology has been the need to rapidly design ludic (playful) activities for people with dementia. By developing creative communities it is possible to make a large number of personalised textile artefacts very quickly and economically. Hand i Pocket funshops make use of the wide range of textile skills of participants’ as well as up-cycling waste fabrics, old clothing and haberdashery to create sensory textiles. Our research has shown that these help to calm, comfort and engage people with dementia for whom life can be limited and communication often difficult.

Funshop participants are encouraged to use their own experience of ‘in the moment’ fun and joy to make textile objects for an older person. They can also draw on their knowledge of the life of a particular person with dementia in order to create a highly personalised textile pocket for them. Hand i Pocket Funshops enable people to share stories through the making process and have been found to be useful ways of building support groups for families and carers. They provide excellent opportunities for raising awareness, distribution of educational and health support literature and information about counseling services to the general public.

The Hand i Pocket methodology was first developed by Professor Cathy Treadaway and Dr. Gail Kenning in Sydney in 2014, in conjunction with Alzheimer’s Australia. The methodology is now being used in countries around the world to build creative communities that address the global challenge of caring for people with dementia as identified by the World Health Organisation and the G8 nations.

You can read more about this work in:

Hand i Pockets Creativity and Fun The Journal of Dementia Care September/October 2015, vol 23 no5.

Also:

http://tireetechwave.org/events/ttw10/tiree-hand-i-pocket-funshop/

https://www.laughproject.info/home-2/hand-i-pockets/