Heart n Soul at The Hub.
Dorota Chapko & Evie Jeffreys.
Heart n Soul at The Hub is a research project led by people with learning disabilities and autistic people. By bringing together people with and without learning disabilities who have different skills and experience, like research, art, design, technology and health, we are discovering new and exciting ways of working and doing research.
We feel passionately about creating a positive change in our society for people with learning disabilities and autistic people. Our hope is that this research project will be a step towards understanding how this change can happen.
As part of this project, a team of co-researchers with learning disabilities co-designed an accessible survey platform and created the first multimedia online survey to challenge and shift public understanding of learning disability. In the survey, intended to feel more like “having a conversation with the public”, the co-researchers ask questions in ways that are important to them and represent how they see themselves.
As part of this project, the co-researchers used the arts as a way to express their thoughts and feelings throughout the research process and as a creative way of coming up with the questions and illustrations for the survey.
The role of the Arts in our project:
- To feel safe and understood, to create a caring and supportive environment for everybody. The task was to draw your hand and provide the names of people you can turn to when you need to talk to somebody.
- To help us think about what we want to achieve with this project.
- To help us think what questions we want to ask the public.
- To think of the audience for our survey – who do want to respond to our survey? Who constitutes the public?.
- To brainstorm who we are as co-researchers and how we want to be portrayed and understood by the public.
- Drawings as the research output included in the survey to provide people with the visual descriptions of some questions and the context.
Explore Heart n Soul’s research surveys can be found at heartnsouleye.com/asks.
