‘I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care’ (2020), is the most recent product in the series led by Dr Ernesto Priego – part of an international collaborative project exploring the potential of co-designed comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research.

Drawn by Peter Wilkins and Melissa Martins, edited by Dr Priego and designed by Simon Grennan (Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada), the new output is a 16-page comic book resulting from collaborative narrative research and co-design sessions with participants. It is the second volume in the series, which began with ‘Parables of Care: Creative Responses to Dementia Care (2017).

Narrative data
Parables of Care is an international collaborative project exploring the potential of co-designed comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research led by Dr Priego, Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design.

The book presents stories crafted from narrative data collected by way of interviews with professional caregivers, educators, and staff at Douglas College in Vancouver, Canada, who have cared for relatives and people with dementia in hospital.

By 2030, 82 million people are anticipated to have dementia and 152 million by 2050.

The previous volume employed the form of the parable to tell individual stories based in real-life cases as told by carers. As the foreword explains, this new comic is structured like a classical Greek tragedy – with a prologue, three episodes, and an epilogue –because the stories the team worked with had the elements of tragedy: inevitability, stratagems to avoid fate that merely bring it on, and catharsis of negative emotions.

The intention of ‘I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care’ is to show the importance of feeling in care-giving, the professional aspects of which are sometimes at odds with the family systems aspect of dementia.

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