Xinwei (Nina) Wei

Balance Me! is a toolkit designed for people with learning disabilities and social care workers. The toolkit consists of three component parts: a balancing base, supporting arms and topping parts.

Inspired by Matthew Ronay’s Organ / Organelle (2014) and the form of brain structure and pheromone that controls emotions, I combined botany and human body science to design each piece. I also incorporated colour psychology into the design, using gradient colours on the surfaces to provide countless possibilities for outcomes made by the participants.

A safe space is imperceptibly created to facilitate conversations while the participants select pieces and seek balance, similar to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which is often used to regulate emotions for people with learning disabilities. The landscapes gradually built by the participants pulsate with healing and vital energy.

Please see more information and the upcoming publication on: https://ninaweiart.wixsite.com/portfolio/balance-me

Balance Me! collaborated with Katie Gaudion and William Renel from Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design as part of the Believe in Us project, joining as one of the creative stations to initiate in-person activities with Heart N Soul in London.

Compared to the regular size, which is more suitable for self or one-to-one conversations, the large-scale version requires more sense of collaboration and is more focused on eliminating isolation, building community connections, and opening up collective dialogues.

"System is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole." (no date. Oxford Languages). So I define a visual creation system as a set of collaborative working tools that can help create visual outcomes.

A conversational "safe space" refers to an environment or setting where individuals feel comfortable, supported, and free to express their thoughts, emotions, and concerns without fear of judgment or negative consequences.

In the context of healthcare and well-being, visual creation systems can combine visual arts and interactive technologies to provide users with a creative environment and medium that can stimulate individual creativity, relieve stress and initiate conversations through visual expression, which means a conversational “safe space” can be created by the visual creation system.

The visual creation system is the material and basis for "making". So we should consider basic factors like material, colour, shape and scale while designing the system.

In addition to these basic factors, these four experimentations tested out other factors such as interactivity, personalisation and autonomy of the visual creation system, providing a theoretical and practical basis for Balance Me!.