Project CREATE Living Lab #2: Learning Lab

February 3rd and 4th 2024

Last month saw the delivery of the second workshop in our Living Lab series: The Learning Lab. We brought together 19 of our Project CREATE YPAG (Young People’s Advisory Group), our project team members and with independent research Helen Kara, we continued our development and exploration of our second work package. The aim of this part of the project is to develop methods (accepted across youth, science, and art) to interpret youth focused artistic products in mental health research.

The weekend was extraordinary and really saw a difference in the confidence and relationships of the YPAG participants. The YPAG groups have now been together for a year and despite being split by age across the two groups, demonstrated that age was clearly no barrier to their friendships.

For most of this group, this is only the second time that they have met one another face to face, but from the last workshop (in June, 2023), there seem to have been a stark increase in their confidence and abilities to take ownership of activities, ask questions and share their ideas with the wider group whilst exploring some quite challenging concepts. The Project CREATE team was blown away and inspired by their skills and contribution.

These Living Lab workshops are in themselves an exploration of how to work in a transdisciplinary setting co-productively and on concepts that are themselves explorative and unknown. To work in such an environment requires a lot of trust from all parties. It is absolutely challenging, sometimes uncomfortable when the way forward is not all that clear. But what we have been able to do is create a space that supports all parties to explore the discomfort, be content with not always knowing and be open to learning from the challenges.

A number of concepts and ideas have already emerged from the workshop. Our next steps will be to take these into the regional workshops and continue exploring and defining what will hopefully become usable frameworks or approaches that can potentially support researchers across disciplines in the interpretation of youth-focused artistic products in mental health work.

To get a glimpse of how the workshop weekend looked, please watch our short film. https://youtu.be/-XRDgBNXR6E