This project deals with participatory design research with 10 children and 5 mothers in a small urban village in Chennai, South India. The project team has identified several challenges, such as the high institutionalization of learning, denial of play and physical discipline of children, that all inhibit the children’s ability to develop to their full potential and find their own learning strategies through play.
The team has also discovered that 5 of 30 families in the village own mobile camera phones. Based on their findings, the team has designed a mobile video workshop. The workshop gives an opportunity for the children to critically investigate and explore their environment and themselves within the environment. It also enables them to understand their position in their environment and to re-invent themselves. In the workshops the children get to design digital artifacts, video clips, through which they can discover, perform, capture and communicate oppressive and unfavorable situations, and to practice change.
The leader of the project, Anna Keune, MA student from Aalto School of Arts & Design, tells a story of how this workshop has had an impact in one urban village family:
“A boy directed a scene of playing at home. His mother came in, took away his toys and threatened to hit him. The mother played herself in the scene. I took a picture of the scene, printed it and handed it to the boy. When I returned to the field a few weeks later, I visited the same mother. To my question about what she remembered from the last interactions, she replied that when the same situation of play and physical discipline came up again, her daughter showed her the picture of the scene we had performed together. The mother stalled and did not proceed with her actions. Later the boy and the girl told me that it became something like a joke in the family.”
The aim of the project is to be able to perform more workshops with more families and give the change for families to facilitate the workshop. One goal is also to develop supporting software for the workshop.
The project leader is searching for related projects that use film for self-assessment and as a tool for critical thinking. Help would also be needed to discover the workshop’s relevancy for other communities and to get ideas on how the workshop can be offered in the future. Partnership with NGOs that would benefit from the workshop would be helpful. More people are needed on the team who can perform these workshops in India and who have skills in software development.
For more information, contact Anna Keune
