Xinwei (Nina) Wei
About
Xinwei (Nina) Wei is a designer, illustrator and interdisciplinary practitioner from Beijing, currently based in London. She graduated from Kingston University BA Illustration Animation in 2022 with a First-Class Honours degree before her MA. Her practice uses visual communication as a bridge or translator between various disciplines to facilitate conversations in healthcare and well-being.
She employs the participatory design processes, moving beyond the convention of traditional illustrative image-making, using expanded illustration as a tool for first-hand, multi-method research rather than just a form of presentation.
Statement
"Our brains are hardwired to utilize tools... A professionally designed tool can assist you in emotion regulation, developing interpersonal skills, and being more focused....", (Dr. Ami Braverman, 2019, Material Psychology).
How to design a visual creation system that uses tools to help people break isolation, initiate conversations, and release stress? My current practice is about how visual creation systems and participatory processes can create conversational “safe spaces” in healthcare and well-being contexts.
Balance Me!
Balance Me!
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! - Believe in Us
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.
Balance Me! - Large Scale Version
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.
Visual Creation System as Conversational "Safe Space"
How visual creation systems can create conversational "safe space" in healthcare and well-being contexts?
"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!.