Abstract
Dementia is a cognitive state that disrupts the holistic sense of space and time, leading to disorientation, fragmentation, and spatial unfamiliarity. Space gradually diminishes, loses its continuous boundaries and details, and becomes unstable and chaotic through this filter. This paper invites dementia into architectural discourse as a critical framework to discuss how the static space is reconstructed through the eyes of people with dementia. Within the scope of this study, people with dementia are conceptualized as “minor” and “nomadic subjects” who are positioned beyond normative cognitive-spatial experience. Their fluid and constantly shifting subjectivities constitute “lines of flight” that unsettle normative space and traditional spatial representations. This study benefits from an open-access platform, “Dementia Diaries,” presenting comprehensive, firsthand narratives of people with dementia as research material. Through discursive analysis, prominent characteristics are translated into situatedness architectural representations as trace-based drawings, layered mappings, and egocentric diagrams that reflect micro-decisions such as hesitation or disorientation in space and show cognitive and spatial collapses. In conclusion, these ambiguous, incomplete, and layered representations that emphasize the spatial experience processes rather than frozen moments may offer a critical alternative to situated subjectivity. These forms of representation, which trace not the physical configuration of space, but the blurred boundaries and movements shaped through this perceptual lens, can open up new paradigms for developing empathetic design approaches and neurodivergence-based inclusivity principles. Simulating such perceptual states and spatial experiences and producing spatial counterparts in the future can contribute to architectural design theory and practice with a transdisciplinary approach.
Presenters
Hülya YavaşResearch Assistant, Architecture, Özyeğin University, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Istanbul, Turkey
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Design Across Time
KEYWORDS
Spatial Perception, Minor Subjects, Nomadic Subjects, Dementia, Neurodivergence, Architectural Representation
