Wellcome Collection Library
This is a co-design project with Wellcome Collection to help make their library and collection more accessible for everyone, especially people with learning disabilities and autistic people. Together, our aim has always been to see and hear more disabled and learning disabled people in libraries and archives, so we’ve been working together to explore ways of doing that.
What do we mean by co-design?
Co-design is when people design things together right from the start, equally. This is different from one group of people asking others to give feedback on a design, or to give their ideas to feed into a design. In co-design power is shared and trust is created.
Using creative methods we have been exploring:
What the library is and how to use it
How to make the library more welcoming and inviting for a range of different people (who might not otherwise go there)
How to make the library more comfortable for different people to use
What is in the collection and how people with learning disabilities and autistic people are represented
We started in 2023 by building trust between Wellcome Collection library staff and the Heart n Soul team using creative approaches. We learnt about the library, how it currently works and what the library team are hoping to change.
We took time to explore the books, art, videos and more in the library, making personal connections with parts of the collection. We agreed to design something that would excite other people to explore the collections, in a style that would make people feel at ease when arriving in the library.
This led us to create a video. It features conversations between us and library staff and our animations about what it is like to explore collections… we’ll be sharing it here soon!
Heart n Soul first started working with Wellcome in 2018. They commissioned our project, Heart n Soul at the Hub, a two year research project funded by Wellcome’s Hub Award. It brought a group of very different people together to do research in new and exciting ways.
