Speculative Care Futures is a report written from the perspective of of an imagined social care facility providing day services for adults described as having Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD) and/or as Sensory Beings. The premise is that a small staff team at the centre have set to explore how they might change the culture of their service to better reflect who their service users are and how staff and service users could share space in more authentic, accessible and connected ways.
“Two years ago we decided to take a look inwards, acknowledge how far we’d come and think about where we might want to go next. We found that we had so many questions, ideas, and quiet nagging feelings about how things could be better. How we could do better. All of these were things that day to day, we just didn’t feel we had the time, or sometimes confidence and permission to really explore. We set off on a journey to investigate these. To see what would happen if we gave ourselves permission to be a bit unsure, to not be perfect, to not see any idea as small, or silly or insignificant.”
The report documents the journey through several ‘explorations’ including themes of play time for staff, non-verbal spaces, slowing down and creating shared sensory experiences. It also contains case studies of four individuals; two service users, one staff member and a visiting artist. It aims to take a compassionate look at how we can better live in community with those described as having PMLD/as sensory beings. Whilst the report is fictionalised it draws on my experience over the last ten years of working with this population in educational, health, play, arts and social care contexts.
My hope in creating this report was to apply my own imagination, experience and neurodivergent lens to thinking about the future of individuals with PMLD and the webs of care and support around them. This is something I don’t come across very much. Thinking about the future of this population is so often focused on problem solving and logistics with no space or resources to think about relationships, quality of experience and access to play and neurodivergent affirming spaces. As I write in the foreword;
Something I’ve noticed over the years of working with Sensory beings is they are often viewed as static. As if they are who they are right now and that’s who they will always be. We don’t really think of them as having a life that moves or changes. Externally or Internally. But they’re not static, no one is. Whether we can see it or not, everyone has a past, present and future. And this group of peoples’ futures deserves attention just as much as anyone else’s
Please feel free to read, download and/or listen to the report below. I would love to hear your thoughts and engage in further conversation and thinking around this work.
You can listen to the audio version of the report below or click here to listen on Mix Cloud player
Play Radical 