Wayfinding in People with Alzheimer’s Disease: Perspective Taking and Architectural Cognition—A Vision Paper on Future Dementia Care Research Opportunities
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a well-written, interesting and profound paper on wayfinding for people with dementia. Even though this is a very wide field with a large body of existing research, the structure and focus of the paper are very clear.
I especially appreciate the fact that the paper was submitted to a journal as “Sustainability”, which I see as a promising effort to break out of the disciplinary fields of dementia and care research and to address the wide and so far rather neglected field of “demographic sustainability”. However, this connection is not to be found in the paper. I may be redundant as one may assume that regular readers of the journal would be able to establish the connection. Still, I would appreciate some thoughts on why dementia-sensitive environments are sustainable environments.
The authors address both wayfinding in buildings and in the urban environment. They elaborate on an underlying understanding that the urban environment needs to be conducive to people with dementias wayfinding abilities. While no one would argue this understanding as such, there are some major challenges, which the authors address. As a solution, they suggest “evaluating planned and existing built environments from the perspective of people with dementia” for which they provide and discuss research tools.
I do agree with this line of thinking, but would like to direct the authors towards challenging their underlying understanding with the question of whether all stakeholders in the urban environment are interested in supporting people with dementias wayfinding abilities? I.e., how do the authors suggest dealing with competing interests? To give a few examples: By introducing new shapes and materials, architects and developers may want their new building to become a landmark – even though it may now compete with other, established landmarks in the neighborhood. Efforts of urban renewal will improve many aspects of a neighborhood, but result in a loss of familiarity. Shop and restaurant owners may actually want to overstimulate the passers-by by with information on their services, maybe even aim for them to lose their sense of space and time. In light of these conflicts, I would appreciate it if the authors could clarify the stark difference in the driving forces behind the design of buildings, especially care facilities, and the urban environment. Along this line of thinking it may be feasible to connect the challenge of the impossibility to simply mandate dementia-sensitive urban design with the goal of developing (demographically) sustainable cities for the future.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
There is a need to make this paper as suitable as possible for international readers. Under the introduction, please bring some international statistics on aging and its association with dementia og how the current statistics of dementia is across the globe.
Figure 1 can be drawn colorful.
I can see that there is a lot of writing in the text with a few tables and figures. Such a style of writing makes the reader tired and hinders getting the message in the article. I suggest the authors to organise the contents and summarise them in tables and figures.
Given the focus of your article on challanges, and also the identity of your research team as comming from various healthcare disciplines, please describe some caring strategies aiming at describing the role of healthcare staff in each healthcare discipline in removing challenges in terms of practice and research.
By the way, I know that reorganising the content and the use of more tables and figures would cover my ideans stated above.
Good luck
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Nothing more.
