Youth Projects

My value on which the project is based:

With rebirthing project I tried to encourage youngsters to look back at their life and take time to think about their experiences.  The most important message was that life is based on both  – happy and sad life events and that they should try to embrace them all. I think this is important because we live in a life where society glory happiness and shame or even disguise sadness. This message based on marketing ideology is extremely dangerous for young persons who are developing their own identity because if they don’t feel happy all the time, they think that something is wrong with them. This modern mentality is also backed up with social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.), which  play a big role in today’s young people life. One of the value is also to remember different life events and take some time to think about them.

The goal of the project:

The goal of the project was to take time to think about one’s own past. We simulated a new birth by crawling  through the tunnel made by fabric. Tonnel symbolized the path from the uterus to the world. When youngsters »came into the world« their task was to think about their past – in specific about four life events: their first memory, memory when they were six years old, memory when they were ten years old, and about most recent memory. Then they had to do their own timeline and represent their events, experiences, people or everything they thought about with symbols, that they could find or made by materials in the house or outside the house. The task was done in full quite. When each of the six of them was finished, everyone represents their masterpice and talk about life events by their choice. After that we had a debate about how they felt, about different emotions (love, happiness, anger, sadness etc.), about trust, people in their life etc. The message »screaming out really loud« in this debate was that they should embrace their own feelings and that they are the best the way they are.

Method used:

Methods used in this project were: introspection and extrospection. By the first one every individual was observing their own feelings, thoughts and all that was going on inside of his body. The second one was used to observe the dynamic of the group, reactions and all the action outside one’s self.

The process of conducting the project:

We learned and experience the Rebirthing task when attending VIA- ME project Learning by design in Porto. Because the population of people and the main meaning of working with youngsters in Design school and Pum-o Radovljica was so different, I had to add the discussion part and adjust the meaning. I did not just try to work with design thinking and imagination, but I was also very careful about the fact that we could be touching the parts of one’s life that could be traumatic and painful for the youngster. That’s why I had to think psychologically and sociological. That is why I added the talking part and avoid the problem of opening some problems and then live the person alone with his feelings. In general I think that the project is very useful tool for working with youngsters.