KU News Release

KU architecture professor’s book on design for adult care centers wins national prize

Keith Diaz Moore

LAWRENCE — A book encouraging better design of adult and dementia day care centers written by an architecture professor at the University of Kansas and two colleagues has won a national prize.

Keith Diaz Moore, associate professor and chair of architecture at KU, and his co-authors, Lyn Geboy and Gerald Weisman of Milwaukee, Wis., have won the 2007 Joel Polsky Prize given by the American Society of Interior Design educational foundation.

Their book, “Designing a Better Day: Guidelines for Adult and Dementia Day Services Centers,” was published in 2006 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Geboy is an architectural researcher, and Weisman directs the Institute on Aging and Environment in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The Polsky prize, which recognizes the most significant contribution to design research and literature, will be presented at the March 2008 ASID Conference on Design in New Orleans, La.

Internationally recognized for his expertise in the design of environments for the elderly, Diaz Moore has published other books and numerous journal articles on the topic. He has also received research grants from Alzheimer’s Association and the Helen Bader Foundation among others for work focused on the elderly. He is past chair of the Environmental Design Research Association and a former trustee of the National Adult Day Services Association Foundation.

Diaz Moore, who joined KU’s faculty in fall 2006, said his interest in designing better dementia environments was triggered in the 1980s while visiting his grandmother, who was an Alzheimer’s patient. She was in a nursing home with locked wards. As a young architect in New York, Moore’s search for better design for people experiencing dementia then became the topic of his 1992 master’s thesis at the University of Minnesota and his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000.

He said he has found it useful to shift perspective in his research. Often in designing for the dementia resident the focus had been on minimizing negative behaviors such as wandering, using restraints or alarms. Diaz Moore’s research has found positive correlations between environmental quality and the occurrence of laughter and engagement, illustrating his focus on positive rather than negative outcomes.

Gerontologists only recently have recognized that wandering is purposeful behavior in dementia residents. Diaz Moore said he encourages his students to consider design that would give residents more opportunities to engage, thus minimizing desires to wander. He asks students to view dementia characteristics positively. “For short attention span, I think ‘spontaneous.’ For wandering, I think ‘exploring.’ ”

“The work I’m doing reflects the social importance that architecture has. People tend to have an impression of architects as esoteric but we make an impact on people’s lives on a daily basis,” Diaz Moore said.

Before coming to KU, Diaz Moore taught at Washington State University’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute.

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