CDG shouldn’t have gone along with a stigmatising term

I can’t really go on criticising the work of well-known and should-know-better design consultancies (see Letters, DW 28 June), but Conran Design Group’s work for the Alzheimer’s Society is a shame (DW 20 September).

They seem to have just accepted the copy – ‘leading the fight against dementia’. Maybe they wrote it. Maybe they fought to change it and lost. Somehow I doubt it. Dementia is a word that needs to go. It stigmatises memory loss and equates it with madness – ’being demented’.

The word ‘cripple’, thank God, has gone, but here was an opportunity to address a profound prejudice about aging put aside by an opportunity to arrange some type. This is process as sleep-walking.

See News Analysis, page 9 Michael Wolff, Founder, Michael Wolff & Company, London WC1