From the Soda Journal, written on 11 April 06 by Matt.
Soda are working with young people from schools across East London, Liz Jewell and Creative Partnerships London East and on a project that will consider how, if possible, technology could be used to provide a platform for young people to have a creative, legitimate and autonomous voice in regards to the various regeneration initiatives that are currently transforming young people’s spaces in East London such as the Olympics, Building Schools for the Future and Thames Gateway Regeneration.
This project takes off where www.visionlondon.co.uk left off. The Vision London website was set up in 2005 as an on-line space for young people, schools and creative practitioners to present and discuss the outcomes of partnership projects that engaged in considering personal journeys from now to 2012. The project was part of the cultural element of London’s Olympic bid and as such should be recognised as having made a contribution to the success of the bid. Now we are working with young people to develop a design brief for technology application that can provide young people with a platform for meaningful creative engagement and input into the work of London 2012, Building Schools for the Future and Thames Gateway Regeneration that is re-shaping the places where children and young people live, play and learn.
In order to ensure that this project is ‘owned’ by young people and is representative of the diversity of interests, ability, cultures and backrounds that make up East London communities, we have been trying to identify how participating young people are able to self-select by deliberately not asking the agencies that work with young people (in this case schools) to suggest participants. The reason for doing this is to try and get beyond the usual suspects syndrome where the same group of unchallenging, confident, creative and articulate young people are put forward by a school on the basis that they will represent the school well or that they will not be ‘too much trouble’.
To get started we asked a student called Safaa from Stokenewington School within the London Borough of Hackney to work with us on an ‘interactive video prototype’ for our target age range (years 6 and 7) that asks the audience to complete a simple short questionnaire with both word and drawings based responses that intends to explore attitude towards change within the built environment. The resulting completed questionnaires will then be used by the project team to select around 100 participants for a ‘design event’. Our hope here is that by inviting young people to attend this event on the basis that they have responded enthusiastically to the video prototype, that we will end up with a group that are genuinely willing to engage in the event and the underlying issues regardless of any sense of pre-requsite ‘skills’ and ‘qualities’.
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