Dr. Megan Strickfaden is an educator, designer, and anthropologist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta (Canada) and an adjunct professor in the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Studies Research Centre at KU Leuven (Belgium). She is in her twenty-fifth year of teaching and has hundreds of scholarly outcomes including publications, patents, designed products, exhibitions, and films. Prior to entering academia, she worked full-time as a design consultant for twelve years and continues to combine practice with research. She has hundreds of scholarly outcomes (patents, designed products, exhibitions, films) including recent films Light in the Borderlands (2013), Evolving Lines (2015) and Dementia Care by Design (2015). Her research programme focuses on looking into how specialty environments and products support quality of life for people with different abilities including older adults and those with disabilities. Current projects include researching: de Hogeweyk (dementia village) in the Netherlands; care environments in China towards curriculum development; how disability is represented at museums around the world; the clothing taskscape towards better designed specialized apparel; and conducting precedent-based research on technologies that assist caregivers as part of WP2.4. Strickfaden is the co-editor of Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society (Garant Publishers, 2016); Space and Culture, Special Issue: (Im)Materiality: Designing for More Sense/s, 15, 3 (2012); and the sole editor of Societies, Special issue: Interrogating Representations of dis/Ability within and through Material Culture (2016).

AGE-WELL Funded Projects

• Illustrating Designed Things as Therapy (2.10-SIP A1) (completed)
• Assistive Technologies that Care for the Caregiver (2.4 ATforCC)

Outputs