‘What does adventure look like?’ Creating icons for a communal map of Anglesey

After a busy week running creative workshops with young people across Anglesey, from the girlguides to Llangefni youth club, the Play:Disrupt team arrived back in our Bristol office and began to upload and transcribe the data we’d collected; videos of a knight bellowing, a child swinging on a zip line with a whooshing sound overhead, models of sandy beaches with the sound of the waves, and benches with a view, and recordings of children explaining what each part means and why. Over the past year, across two pop up events and ten workshops, we have engaged over 180 children across Anglesey in our research.

We aimed to find out not just where they like to play or hang out, but what makes these places good places to play, what makes a place feel playful, and how we can use creativity to represent these places on a map. In Malcolm’s earlier blog, he described how our methodology of embodied and making activities can often uncover deeper responses from participants (and some sillier ones too).

As well as this research into young people’s experiences of their area, we were also researching how best to work with them on a communal map of the island; what makes them want to engage?

Animation, through movement and sound, soon found their way into our workshops, as young people created lively symbols to represent their favourite places on the island. Young people created icons or animations to represent physical places, e.g. the beach, or the park, as well as less tangible aspects, such as ‘an adventurous place’, ‘a place you can make friends’, or ‘somewhere I can get to on my own’. Contributions often sounded poetic when young people described what they’d made:

‘two friends,
crystal ball,
light going round it;
safe place, joy, happiness’

'waves - pattern, rhythmic,
lots of space between them,
one cloud on clear blue sky,
pink - comfort and safety’

‘fun, exciting, colourful, victory bells’

We began to film these short animations as participants moved their models and made a sound, and the software team updated their website so that we could instantly upload their icons on to a communal digital map of the island. There was always a ‘WOW’ moment as participants saw their own animations pop up and bring their maps to life, and we can’t wait to see the next version of the PMP as it incorporates more of their creative input.

Watch our video below to get a sense of our early-stage process and see some loud, vibrant models created by the children of Anglesey.