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The University of Southampton
Engineering

Vivid pain paintings inspire the engineering of new medical devices

Published: 15 March 2019
Paint your pains workshop

Bioengineers from the University of Southampton are encouraging the public to paint their pain in a creative project guiding the multidisciplinary development of future medical devices.

The Paint Your Pain project is hosting a series of hands-on workshops where volunteers visually represent physical and emotional pains through paintings and drawings.

Researchers from Micro and Nano Therapies (MiNather) group are bringing together art, engineering and medicine to reflect on human experience and help engineers better understand the impact of their technological solutions, such as novel stents, on patients’ quality of life.

The research team are inviting the public to contribute new designs at this weekend’s Science and Engineering Day in their latest session between 11am and 2pm in the Murray Building (B58). Volunteers do not need to have any previous painting experience but must be aged 16 or over.

Project Lead Sarvenaz Sohrabi , a postgraduate research student from the Winchester School of Art, says: “Each painting tells a different story and we want to understand how people show their pain. We are interested in analysing artworks by detecting differences in shapes and colours as well as the selection of types of brushes and markers.”

Paint your Pain was launched in 2018 and received Public Engagement with Research (PER) funding in the winter to organise several sessions across the UK and Europe. Trends from the participants’ artwork will be interpreted and expressed by Sarvenaz through a series of new paintings, 3D printed objects, audio and video art, and live performances in a summer exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery.

Upcoming Paint your Pain seminars and workshops include appearances at Southampton’s Umbrella Arts Festival on Saturday 23rd March, the Public Engagement and Performance Conference in Wakefield on Friday 29th March, the Southampton Pint of Science festival in May and June’s Storytelling for Health 2 conference in South Wales and International Conference on The Arts in Society in Lisbon, Portugal.

“People’s expression of pain is varied but we are already identifying trends in some colours and shapes across different people groups and backgrounds,” Sarvenaz says. “For instance, I was expecting to see dark colours but what we are finding is often very different.”

The project team hope to secure follow on funding later this year to expand the multidisciplinary approach and follow the emotions of patients over the course of two or three years.

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