Hippo

description

Opportunity: Using playful rehabilitation as a source of meaningful social engagement and empowerment for seniors after physical trauma.

Hippo is intended for seniors experiencing depression following physical trauma and their caregiving family. The focus is to promote creative interactions,  that move past memory loss, cognitive degeneration or challenged mobility using their remaining skills. The aim is to provide all the members of the caregiving family a means to understand what the senior is experiencing through their own body, as well as a new way to observe and understand the senior's needs through play.

*Play relieves power struggles between seniors and theircaregivers. It provides a way for us to express ourexperiences and feelings through a natural, self-guidedprocess. It is also an experimental space for us tounderstand ourselves and accept others.

* The name Hipo is derived from ‘Hippocampus’, a part of the brain critical for memory storage and recall. Navigating through the mazes created in Hipo activates this and visual processing centers.