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Short abstract

This study examines how theatre develops new socio-technical imaginaries for dementia care using the ASTS framework. Participatory workshops and improvisation enable participants to co-create innovative care scenarios. Theatre serves as an epistemic tool to redefine technology and future care.

Long abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, Art, Science and Technology Studies (ASTS) have developed, challenging traditional boundaries that separated art, science, and technology (Rogers 2024). In care, especially in Medical Humanities, ASTS has been productive (Parolin & Pellegrinelli, 2026). It generates and critically examines collaboration, contamination, and co-production between art and science (Rogers et al. 2023). By creating participatory spaces, ASTS encourages collective knowledge. In the ASTS framework, we explore the link between theatre and caring for people with dementia through empirical research using improvisation and participatory design in Healthcare Residences. As Bouchard and Mermikides (2024) note, artistic engagement broadens health's epistemology beyond clinical reasoning, fostering diverse understanding of care. Our work shows theatre as a co-production site where artistic, clinical, and experiential knowledge intersect to shape socio-technical imaginaries of dementia care.

The study employs theatrical improvisation and participatory workshops to help residents, caregivers, and facilitators collaboratively create socio-technical care scenarios based on daily practices. The findings reveal that these scenarios present a vision of technology as an evolving relational actor within the dementia care ecology—one that functions through predictive (temporality), performative (enactment), affective (embodiment), and ethical (care) potentialities. Methodologically, the contribution shows that theatre acts as an epistemic device that contextualises and reshapes how care and technology are expressed and practised. The performance becomes a crucial liminal space for externalising sociotechnical conflicts and co-creating futures beyond the present.