‘Measuring Wellbeing Creatively’ is funded through a UCL Grand Challenges: Human Wellbeing Award. The project will work with participants who have acquired communication difficulties (as a result of a brain injury or stroke) to explore how different colours and sensations can help to express feelings and emotions.  Through a series of workshops, the project will co-develop a visual toolkit for expressing emotions. The project seeks to provide original research on creative and accessible methodologies for measuring wellbeing.

Research Activities

1. Three co-production workshops with adults with acquired communication difficulties (January, February and March 2017)

2. Design of the creative nonverbal toolkit based on colour and co-designed by participants.

3. Cross-disciplinary symposium at UCL to present research (July 2017). This will include participants, researchers across faculties and professionals with an interest in wellbeing-related research.

4. Display of the co-production process at UCLH.

Research Team:

Dr Nuala Morse is the project’s Principal Investigator and is an Honorary Researcher at UCL Culture. She is also the Postdoctoral Research Associate for Not So Grim Up North

Jo Volley is the project’s Co-Investigator and is the Deputy Director (Project) and Part-Time Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Nir Segal is the project’s artist-researcher and a PhD Candidate at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Dr Michael Dean is on the project team and is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the UCL Department of Language and Cognition

Research Collaborators:

Prof Helen Chatterjee, Professor in Biology UCL Biosciences, and Head of Research and Teaching for UCL Culture.

Dr Linda Thomson is the project’s Senior Research Associate and Cognitive Psychologist at UCL.

External Collaborators

Professor Martin Marshall, Professor of Healthcare Improvement, Department of

Applied Health Research, UCL and GP, Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health and Wellbeing

Centre

Mr Guy Noble, Arts Curator, UCLH Arts and Heritage

National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing