Residents from 2018 to 2021, Heart n Soul is an award-winning creative arts company led by people with and without disabilities and autistic people. They explored productivity, difference and what it is to be ‘normal’.
What they did
Heart n Soul at The Hub was our third residency, brought together by the creative arts organisation Heart n Soul in 2018.
Their research was led by people with and without learning disabilities and autistic people. The most important thing to the project was that everyone worked together as equals.
Heart n Soul at The Hub’s research questions were inspired by the life experiences of the people working on the project, who are often the people ‘under a microscope’.
Flipping the microscope, they found new and inclusive ways to do co-research, both in The Hub at Wellcome Collection and then online, working remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Their research led them in multiple directions. They invited thousands of members of the public to engage with challenging, personal questions about learning disability and human value, and produced an open‑access, accessible survey tool. They imagined alternative, more inclusive futures through art and design methods. They also explored what matters most in caring and being cared for. Project outputs included an online course in accessible UX design and multiple research papers, among them co‑authored articles on human–computer interaction.
You can see and hear conversations and stories from the project on their multimedia website. They hope it will help other people and projects to create space for true collaboration and value the ‘whole person’, whatever field they are interested in.
As a result of their work in The Hub, Heart n Soul went on to receive funding from The Health Foundation to work with an NHS Trust and London Borough on radically redesigning health services for people with learning disabilities and autistic people.