My final body of work for degree show focused in on the idea of making politics easier to engage with for young people. It's an area I feel particularly passionate about but one that is often, as with a lot of issues relating to politics, dealt with in a serious way. For this part of fulfilling the brief, I took the objects I had created and designed a workshop around them that facilitated that interaction. In keeping with the silly atmosphere, the activities were designed around games partnered with social research methods to make a fun afternoon talking about politics.
Four individual games were designed or adapted to gather information on how the participants felt about politics in an informal and engaging way. A mix of individual and team games with a variety of timescales and focuses kept it interesting for the participants and gathered a variety of information. The games themselves consisted of an interactive questionnaire, a fill-in-the-blanks game with the face cushions, a quiz and a "design your own politician" top trump style card.
Because of the nature of the objects, most of the answers to the questions I asked were silly. But underpinning the silliness were comments that tapped into the way the participants really felt about politics.