This project focuses on finding innovative ways to communicate ideas about resilience and helping people build resilience. Working together with practitioners, parents, young people, design academics and students, we have prototyped resilience tools and are finding out whether they are useful to people in practice.

Project timeframe

This research project commenced in 2015 and is ongoing.

Project outputs

Blogs and film clips about the co-designing resilience project are available.

Resilience-building products are available to purchase at cost. To purchase products, please email info@boingboing.org.uk.

Project aims

Our research project aims are to:

  • explore ways of turning the resilience tools we have already developed which are based on our resilience framework into more useful learning and communication products
  • work with art and design academics and students to co-produce games and other approaches
  • make our resilience framework accessible to people with varying learning capacities
  • explore the viability of an online shop for the social enterprise Boingboing staffed by young people with complex needs.

There was a pop-up shop at Somerset House, developed with input from design academics and students at the University of Brighton. It sold various products to help young people develop resilience. In terms of utopian ideas, pop-up shops such as this can be a creative space offering hope for the future when life is very tough. The items on sale were product development evolutions of prototypes we had developed. Simon, a young person who works for Boingboing

Project findings and impact

The outcomes of this project – 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 had produced and chat about our new products. Opportunities to play the Sun and Clouds game, the Resilience Tower and the Resilience Roadmap were set up at the fair, and visitors experimented with our Talking Heads interactive wall and with building their own Resilience Tree or Resilience Box. At another event, Prince Harry played our Resilience Tower game.

At the Utopia Fair, we captured feedback from people who visited our stall. Leading up to the Utopia Fair event, we held workshops with young people with complex needs to co-develop prototypes based on their ideas, including at our Designing Resilience event.

All of our products have been developed by young people with complex needs, and/or practitioners supporting them, to help young people face challenges in life. The tools are available online on a not-for-profit basis.

Research team and partners

Angie Hart
Suna Erygit-Madwazmuse
Nick Gant and students from the School of Art and Design
Ceri Davies from Community University Partnership Programme

Arts Connect
Boingboing
Community21
Digital artists and designers, parents, practitioners and policymakers.