Stories to connect with: disadvantaged children creating phygital community objects to share their life-narratives of resilience and transformation

This project is a collaboration between Barnardo's, children and young people who are active in Barnardo's services, academics from five disciplines at two universities, and well-known children's authors. The core group of Barnardo's young people will be trained as co-researchers to collect stories from other children and young people who access Barnardos services about their lives and experiences of overcoming adversity. The stories elicited from children will inevitably draw on their own 'funds of knowledge' (Gonzalez et al 2005), giving credence to their own experience and encouraging others to empathise. We expect the consequent building of social capital via authorship and dissemination to contribute to young people's capacity in accessing and improving services. This process will be carefully managed with input from trained care workers and community researchers. The stories will be refined and revised in workshops with well-known children's authors (Melvin Burgess and Adele Geras) who have agreed to participate in the project (Burgess has adopted a 'found fiction' approach in 'Kill All Enemies' 2011). The resulting stories will be inspirational for other children and young people and their families, some of whom would benefit from Barnardo's or other children's services. In order to connect with these other families, the stories will be transcribed, re-written, narrated, and placed in phygital (physical-digital) objects, designed by the young storytellers themselves in collaboration with digital design academics from Lancaster University Imagination Lab. The phygital artefacts, which might vary in size and take any form as determined by the C&YP (e.g. a hand-held animal, a life-size tree, a dustbin, a wizard), will be located in positions in the community identified by the participants and Barnardo's as having the most potential for impact on a wider audience. The stories will have the potential to be interactive, personalised and take the form of written and/or spoken language.
Working within an appreciative philosophy, the children and young people will generate their own stories and elicit affirmative stories from other CYP reflecting their resilience, strengths and achievements in negotiating the challenges of their particular and often difficult circumstances. These 'stories to connect with' will act as counter-narratives to those which usually circulate about children in contact with and 'on the edge' of engaging with children's social services and will challenge preconceptions and assumptions about people who access services, both in the media and in children's literature (Dahl 1993; Booktrust 2006). Placing these stories within bespoke objects which in themselves connect and challenge other people will enable the stories to travel outside of the social, geographical and political locale in which they have been produced and to connect more widely in both the virtual and physical world. It is our belief that being 'on the edge' creates a particular context and potential energy and that the CYP's phygital story objects can act as pores in the boundaries of the 'edge' through which communication can take place and lead to a softening of the boundaries between different elements of the same geographical community.
The phygital artefacts will be trialled and evaluated by members of the public in at least three different community settings: a school; a shopping centre; and a Barnardos centre. The refined artefacts will then be launched at a community event, before being located (semi-)permanently in areas considered by the whole team to be the most effective for disseminating the stories to diverse audiences within the community.

The immediate beneficiaries of the research will be the participants themselves, in terms of increase in confidence and self-esteem, and their wider communities in terms of knowledge and understanding. We hope to increase knowledge about and participation in Barnardo's services specifically, and children and families with whom Barnardo's work will benefit directly from the artefacts produced. Through increasing the effectiveness of the charity's work, children and their families will benefit. We hope to increase empathy and understanding within and beyond the community involved in the research, and outputs will also be disseminated further to children in schools and libraries. During the research, a local school will take part in a workshop where the phygital artefacts will be trialled, providing an exciting educational experience. Similarly the general public at a shopping centre, and Barnardos users at one of their centres will benefit from taking part in evaluation of the phygital artefacts. At the end of the project the phygital artefacts will be 'liberated' at an event designed and organised by the whole team. This will take the form of a phygital story festival, a 'smart mob' style event, or an exhibition of the phygital artefacts in a community location, where members of the public will be able to interact with them. Thereafter, the artefacts will be physically located in the community according to the mapping developed by the CYP participants. This final stage of the project will have a lasting impact in that the artefacts will continue to influence the public, including those 'hard-to-reach' because of the strategic placing of the artefacts.
Barnardo's workers will benefit from further understanding of issues affecting children in their care, from the direct perspective of the child.
Other third sector workers will benefit from sharing the methodological and procedural insights gained in carrying out the project with disadvantaged children and young people in community settings. We will communicate these through ongoing updates and publicity about the project on Barnardo's and university websites, via conferences, and articles in practitioner journals.
Academics will benefit from understanding ways of working with children, young people and charities, communicated through university networks and the Connected Communities programme, as well as academic articles and conferences.
We will make recommendations to government departments regarding children's participation in shaping services that they access. As the government states: "Effective participation gives children and young people the opportunity to make a positive contribution to their communities and to develop the skills, confidence and self-esteem they will need for the future. (...)Involving children and young people in the planning, delivery and evaluation of services that affect their lives is not only likely to improve services, but also helps in developing confident, engaged and responsible citizens." (DoE website).
To this end we will communicate our findings to the Department for Education and the Office of the Children's Commissioner through written reports. We also intend to report to the National Literacy Trust and the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education in relation to our findings concerning children's multimodal literacy and uses of stories.
Book and e-book publishers will be interested in our findings regarding understanding the current and future audience of stories, and the potential for using phygital design as a means of communicating narratives. We will make our findings available to the publishers of our consultant authors for the development of future projects.
Businesses wishing to exploit the possibilities of phygital design in a variety of contexts will benefit from the knowledge and understanding which we will convey through our impact activities.