Heart n Soul

18 May

A long-term partnership

Unthinkable has been working with the amazing arts organisation, Heart n Soul for many years. It is one of our most enduring, fulfilling and collaborative partnerships.

We’ve worked with them over the years to think about how digital technology could be used to support the incredible diverse range of activity the organisation delivers for and with people with learning disabilities.

Our journey started with the senior team over 10 years ago thinking about the way digital technology could become part of their communications and from there has grown into every part of their approach. Here, we highlight three of the projects we’ve worked on together.

`Dean Rodney Singers installation at Southbank Centre by Heart n Soul. Photo © Tim Mitchell / Heart n Soul`

Working with Unthinkable has been an unfolding exploration. We have worked together for many years now in many iterations, and continue to find ways we can mutually support and excite each other whilst making the world a more open, equal and creative world for everyone.

Mark Williams MBE, Artistic Director / Chief Executive

Dean Rodney Singers

In 2011, we were commissioned by Heart n Soul to help develop the digital component of the Dean Rodney Singers project as part of the 2012 Olympics and funded by the Unlimited fund. It was a highly ambitious digital arts project conceived by Dean Rodney, a musician with autism who has worked with Heart n Soul for many years.

The idea was to create a new global collaborative band and help the band use shared digital tools on the web and iPads to create 24 new pieces of music that would be brought together in an interactive installation at the Southbank centre. This was a project close to our hearts - we love creative collaboration and pushing the technology further than might have been imagined for it originally.

We helped design the digital methods for enabling global communication and music making between seven countries and 72 musicians and supported the exciting new partnership between Heart n Soul and the creative computing team at Goldsmiths University to produce a range of new interactive devices for the installation.

SoundLab

Our next ambitious activity in 2014 was to devise a new creative research project as part of NESTA’s digital R&D fund. We helped coordinate the idea development and the successful proposal.

The primary aim of the project, called SoundLab, was to identify which digital music technologies could best help people with learning disabilities to make the music and sound they wanted to make. People with learning disabilities continue to be isolated, ignored and excluded from mainstream society despite the desire to be better connected. The SoundLab project looked how we can improve the expressive potential of digital tools, such as mobile phones and tablets, so that people with disabilities could be included, empowered and able to live more independent creative lives.

We designed and delivered a series of SoundLab workshops over the course of a year that brought the team together through research and code design processes to create a number of practical outputs.

A key output we created was the SoundLab Guide website to provide information on the best technologies and approaches. This website grew into a practical resource for music makers, teachers, music facilitators, and arts organisations. We are extremely pleased that our guide won the best SEND resource award at the Music Teacher Awards for Excellence 2016.

We coordinated engagement with the music tech industry and helped set up and deliver a number of SoundLab events which brought together a huge range of people - technology developers music teachers, people with learning disabilities and curious people looking to explore the potential of digital music making in a new way.

Heart n Soul at the Hub

The third ambitious project we worked on with Heart n Soul was a deep collaboration with the Wellcome Hub, part of the Wellcome Trust, in 2018.

The Hub offered an opportunity for Heart n Soul to develop a new co-research methodology that explored how society sees people with learning disabilities and autism. We worked with the team to develop the proposal and make sure that Heart n Soul’s unique approach to using digital technology was being represented.

The proposal was successful and we were then overjoyed to work with the team that was part of the hub to develop whole range of digital ways to support an innovative research methodology. We then went on to develop the approach to sharing insights and the website used to share the project’s findings.

As part of this project, we developed a new immersive engagement prototype that was funded by the Digital Catapult as part of the CXR strand. We worked closely with AV experts Call and Response to create an experience that could be delivered in mainstream locations such as shopping centres to create a kind of conversational experience with people with learning disabilities and autism. We used a combination of technologies to create a digital conversational experience long before ChatGPT had landed!