HOMEDEM Co-designing a Home with Dementia is an innovative training Doctoral Network of the Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Actions, established to provide training in the field of designing and caring for people with dementia for senior and early-stage researchers. HOMEDEM focuses on the recent trend in Europe to support people with dementia (PwD) to live at home, if they wish, for as long as possible with appropriate care.

The tendency to rely on costellazioni assistenziali, i.e. the dynamic informal care relationships with and around the person with dementia, requires a training network structured on three levels:

• at the micro level, how dementia affects the relationships between people with dementia and their care constellations;
• on the meso level, understanding the changing needs of the home living environment;
• at the macro level, understanding how care constellations navigate the complex care ecosystem of community-based services and supports.

Through its multidisciplinary approach, including design, psychosocial health sciences, economics and policy evaluation, training in HOMEDEM will enable researchers to respond to current and future care settings and to influence the way community care is organised for people with disabilities and their care constellation, i.e. how products, services and tools are co-designed and implemented in care settings across Europe.

By combining training in both collaborative research and practice and a collaborative continuum between school and industry, the outcome of the HOMEDEM research will be a new care infrastructure based on the fusion of care and design and leading to new models of care for people with disabilities and their care constellations.