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3. Supporting Young People to Design Their Own Lives


Key Concepts: 1) Supporting Young People; 2) Designing Life as a Creative Act; 3) Juxtaposition

The development of one’s life, from its very earliest days, can--although we may have to find different words to convey this to children--be thought an expression of creativity as we form relationships, manage multiple identities-in-formation, respond to complexity and unexpected dramas, and recognize resources and opportunities as the tools available to us to make changes and direct—or design—where we want our lives to go. Under this theme, we will develop a storyboard or sketch as the basis for a book, a screenplay, or another piece of literature aimed at young people to encourage them to design or "compose" their own lives.

What do we mean by "young people"? For the purposes of this exploration, this simply means younger than you. Think back to stages of life that you've already crossed, and consider what might be needed by those who are just approaching those stages now. Consider how there may be opportunities to support such individuals to not only learn about the world, but also to actively design the lives that allow them to bring out the best of themselves. According to a much-quoted passage, "luck is the residue of design". But good design doesn't happen by accident. Nor can we simply tell someone, "just do it". Imagine further that you can start to see the link between what you have done to design your life as it is now, and what you wish you had known back then. What might be gained by you sharing your experience with young people?

Additionally, we don't always experience life through "pure" forms. The senses work together to help create our experience. We encounter complex ideas where different parts work together as a system. Where associations and relationships between things, people, ideas convey meaning. We hear words such as juxtapose, hybrid, tapestry, mashup, multimedia. amalgam, composite, synthesis, confluence. Design includes being able to see things in relative position to others, and sometimes recognizing that we have to deal with the tension between multiple parts that "don't really go together".

For the Written/Creative Product, we introduce a few special constraints this time; in addition to the usual technical requirements, develop your Product with the following in mind:
  1. The Product should reflect directions that lead toward the development of a storyboard, sketch, outline, treatment (such as used in filmmaking), or similar structure. (The purpose of these structures is to make use of a narrative approach rather than a didactic one; they convey a vision with "story" at the center, rather than "instruction". They refer to people [e.g. characters] and their relationships, sequence or progression for getting from one place/phase to another, actions or activities, and multiple levels of meaning/subtext). Your Product will be the basis for a full book, film, or other piece of literature that would be developed given unlimited time and energy. But in the limited space of our course, what you submit for the Product is enough to point us in that direction. Remember that even if you develop the storyboard/sketch so that this takes up most of the Product, you still will need some additional explanatory writing/prose where you are helping to frame the work and provide the context around what you are trying to accomplish.
  2. Along the way over the upcoming weeks, you should expect to identify and review at least two, but maybe more, specific pieces of literature aimed at young people (and include them in your project's bibliographic references). Seek items that help you to get clear on what you particularly hope to convey to young people about designing their lives. You should be able to talk about these items as points of reference for your own Product - how you were inspired by them, or how your work departed from them. Although you may need to identify some academic sources or writing about children's literature to help inform your thinking (as you've done with previous Themes), this requirement involves also finding items that are actually designed for a young audience -- they should primarily be fiction books. Most children's literature, graphic novels, and even some comic books may be ok. Video games, films, video or TV series don't count.
  3. The Product itself should be created by using two (or more) of the pure forms. This just allows the meaning/messages in your Product to be conveyed through how the forms interact, not just on their own terms individually. Consider use of text, images, texture, sound, video, different styles of literature/writing/fine arts, tangible materials, and so on. Many familiar types of creative works are naturally built around this idea already: picture books, narrated slide shows, and videos, for example, involve some combination of image and/or sound and/or text.

In the Product submission, there should also be some reference to your expected audience (expected age range, and how the way that you address "designing a life" makes sense for that age range).

Use the description so far to start to get going with some ideas. When you are ready to deepen your thinking after exploring your initial impulses about what you might want to do, read on through the following sections.


Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life, offers this introduction:

If we think about composing our lives as a creative act, then we might consider further how our experiences can be offered as a scaffold for young people to be encouraged to design, or compose, their own lives.

We may consider how young people relate to literature and stories as a way of thinking about developing their own lives. Images and words form building blocks of dialogue, setting, plot, and character and extend to themes, voice, relationships, and other issues. Imagine a process of using these elements creatively and then developing a storyboard or sketch as the basis for a book, a screenplay, or another piece of literature aimed at young people about designing or composing a life. Through this process, we might recall how we have responded to stories during our own younger years, review themes of designing a life from existing literature for young people, and create the storyboard for an original work intended to help young people develop a sense of designing their own lives.

The framework mentioned here suggests that we are not simply looking to write a children's book or screenplay, but rather acknowledging that our own engagement with stories, especially during our younger years, and as both creator and audience, may have established a space that contributes to how we understand our own lives and our role in designing it for ourselves, separate from a range of forces that may have shaped or imposed upon us a life (or parts of life) designed by others. By reaching into those personal experiences, we then have a starting point for connecting personal creativity to the design of our lives; moreover, we can engage in the act of creativity by developing a storyboard in the interest of sharing this experience with young people, and with the idea that young people may be encouraged to form insights into how they may creatively address the design of their own lives as well. This emphasis of sharing our experience means that we are using this creative act as an offer to a wider community -- an opportunity for others to build upon it, rather than something that we keep to ourselves as a private creative expression.

The following kinds of questions may prompt us further:

Possible sources and readings:

As with the Theme 1 and 2 topics, your own exploration may, of course, lead you to more recent or more appropriate sources for your own context and interests.