Boingboing’s range of co-produced resilience tools were showcased in a ‘pop up shop‘ at the Utopia Fair 24-26 June 2016 at Somerset House in London. This free event was an opportunity for people to see what we’ve been up to and chat about our new products. Our team worked very hard, and we’ll post the photos on our blog very soon.
Ordering Products
If you missed the Utopia Fair, don’t worry, you can still get hold of our fantastic resilience tools from our online shop.
Designing Resilience – What’s it all about?
If you came to our Designing Resilience event in November 2015 you will remember the amazing range of resilience tools being developed by young people with complex needs together with local communities (including Arts Connect and Brighton-based organisation Community21), digital artists and designers, academics, parents, practitioners and policy makers. You may have enjoyed playing the Sun and Clouds game, the Resilience Tower or the Resilience Roadmap, or you might have experimented with our Talking Heads interactive wall or built your own Resilience Tree or Resilience Box.
“There will be a ‘pop up’ shop at Somerset House, developed with input from design academics and students at the University of Brighton. It will be selling various products to help young people develop resilience. In terms of utopian ideas, pop up shops can be a creative space offering hope for the future when life is very tough. These will be product development evolutions of prototypes we have developed.” – Simon, a young person who works for Boingboing.
All of our resilience tools have been developed by young people with complex needs, and/or practitioners supporting them, to help young people face challenges in life. The tools will be marketed through our pop-up shop and sold online after that on a not-for-profit basis. If we ever end up making any money from this we will feed it back into supporting young people.
“It’s been great working in collaboration on these products and we’ve really come up with something that none of us could have designed on our own.” – Nick Gant, the design academic from the University of Brighton leading from the design side.
Without wishing to blow our own (royal) trumpet, Prince Harry tried his hand at the Resilience Tower recently at the launch of the Heads Together Campaign in London where project partners YoungMinds were demonstrating it. The tower was the brain child of Tadgh Crozier, a resilience practitioner who is part of the Boingboing community and is implementing resilience-based practice ideas.
Photo: Prince Harry playing the Resilience Tower (c)Twitter/Kensington Palace
“This game helps us think about and chat through the things in life that we need to help us when things get tough. Resilience includes being able to bounce forward after something difficult has happened, or when life is generally tough. Finding ways to challenge bad things that others might do to us is part of this. We all need things in place to help us do that.” – Angie Hart, Boingboing and University of Brighton.
The Boingboing community includes young people, families and adults with experience of social disadvantage and inequalities, as well as supportive academics and practitioners. In fact, we all find the resilience-based approaches we’ve developed useful to help us get through tough times.
