Inbetweeness – Fostering belonging through design for adolescents

I have explored how to foster belonging for adolescents experiencing inbetweeness. I have therefore interacted with professionals, working with youth, health, and culture to find ways to respond to this issue. I have created surveys for adult youths and conducted workshops to explore ways to foster belonging. The result became a circular guide for youth workers, to continuously support their process of inviting, hosting, making, and reflecting.

Deeply lonely in adolescence

Adolescents are continuously faced with conflicting challenges as they fall between growing out of childhood, forming their own identity outside of family ideals, exploring relationships, and the increasing responsibility of looming adulthood. These challenges could result in experiences of deeply rooted loneliness and falling between neither belonging here nor there. Youths may struggle to find meaning and belonging as they are lost in the existential loneliness of inbetweeness.

I created a fantasy map with metaphorical locations for different ways loneliness or belonging can manifest themselves. This map along with an image of adolescent’s inbetweeness became important visualizations for the project and the start of the guide.

Throughout this project, it became important to avoid placing the responsibility of overcoming loneliness on lonely people themselves. The Feminist Loneliness Studies pushed me to find ways that we might change the systems, rather than the victims of the systems.

“We resist the idea that lonely people themselves are a problem to be solved.” – Shoshana Magnet and Celeste E. Orr (2022)

Designing inbetweeness, the Japanese philosophy of “Ma”

I have also related the notion of inbetweeness to co-designing, inspired by Yoko Akama (2015), who writes about the possibilities of “becoming with” by relating to the Japanese philosophy of “Ma”. In this case, inbetweeness opens up to the uncertainties and the what-ifs, that push us to see potentialities, be creative, and become together. With this philosophy in mind, I designed my workshop with spaces of inbetweeness, that left room for becoming together and co-designing potentiality.

Workshop

I invited people on campus to an open workshop where they could reflect on the topic of inbetweeness from their point of view and then ideate about what they would have needed as teens to feel more belonging. We also explored non-performative creative making as a tool to foster connections between each other, relying on neutral topics. From this workshop, the survey, and the interactions with different stakeholders it became apparent that trusted adults are essential to foster belonging for youths. Trusted adults can meet youths in their arenas and create safe spaces where they can motivate youths to take part in activities and therefore foster belonging.

The guide

The guide is a tool for these trusted adults, identified as youth leaders, to use as reflection material throughout their work. It became important that this guide would be circular to meet the needs of an ever-changing target group. One collaborator who is involved in pedagogy and design said:

“Children and youth are not static, they grow up!”

There is a need to readjust to specific contexts and people as youth grow up. The guide is built on four main sections: inviting, hosting, making, and reflecting. The writing of this guide is mainly based on the different interactions with stakeholders, the workshop, and the survey.

When making the guide itself I was in conversation with the involved stakeholders who encouraged and influenced its final design. They said that such a guide could be useful, as there does not exist something like this. They felt that the text along with the images was clear and helpful and that the term inbetweeness was important to know about. The guide was further developed as an inclusive reflection tool due to the insights of my collaborators.

Get access to the full guide here.

References

Akama, Yoko. 2015. “Being Awake to Ma: Designing in between-Ness as a Way of Becoming With.” CoDesign, October. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081243.

Magnet, Shoshana, and Celeste E. Orr. 2022. “Feminist Loneliness Studies: An Introduction.” Feminist Theory, February. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211062734.