B.E.A.C.O.N. - Beacon Emits Audio from Color, Or Not

People who suffer from dementia are often isolated due to lack of ways of communication. In many cases verbal communication can be difficult to perform at all. We created Beacon with the goal to let people with dementia interact with a very simple and intuitive control interface to give them a means of non-verbal communication, and let them take control over the soundscapes that Beacon is capable of producing. In this paper we describe our concept Beacon, its physical form and how the design makes it possible for a person with dementia to control the software by moving around items of different colors and sizes on its surface to create synthesized and sampled sounds. We hope that Beacon will produce positive results among people with dementia, and that the interaction will be rewarding.