Making Connections  

HeART Lab brings together healthcare providers, researchers, artists, and community members to build collaborative research partnerships.  Our methods harness art, research, and technology to work towards health equity – Health Equity, Art, Research, Technology. 

Making Inquiries 

We engage service users and people with lived experience in all phases of research, including collaboration on potential research questions and designs, contributing to data interpretation, and making decisions about how and where our findings are shared.  We use the principles of co-design to generate questions, explore understandings, and identify gaps and opportunities in current research and practice. These inquiries are the foundation of our person-and-community oriented research projects, which draw on multiple arts-engaged and participatory qualitative methods, including storytelling, digital storytelling, journey mapping, and in-depth interviewing.

Making Meaning 

Our storied approach to research honours personal, embodied, and social meaning-making. Our projects feature collaborative discovery and interpretation to seek contextualized understandings of issues and experiences at the individual, community, and broader systems levels that impact health and well-being. Our lab has the facilitation expertise, tools, and technology to deliver digital storytelling workshops, in person using our mobile digital storytelling lab or online using video conferencing technology, to support participants to reflect on their lived experiences and create their own digital stories. 

Making Change 

We seek opportunities for expression, partnership, advocacy, improvement, and innovation in all phases of what we do. Insights and findings from our research and collaborations are shared widely, academically and creatively, to support the implementation of new ideas and to advocate for change. This includes The Body Electric, an annual digital art exhibition, Ars Medica, Canada’s first health humanities journals.