United Kingdom: Environmental design education in a changing world

We argue that developments in other spheres of life have left environmental design less than fully fit for purpose. Dementia is a global issue. Evidence-based environmental design should be part of the solution in every country and in all cultures. However, research evidence reflects and reproduces the contexts in which it was created, and environmental design education has too frequently been insufficiently critical of both the quality of the evidence base and its generalisability to other contexts. We provide examples drawn from our experience of the challenges to its delivery in different parts of the world before calling for a new, more nuanced approach to environmental design education which we call ‘Designing for context’.