MONO-MOJO – Facilitating dialogue through satire
MONO-MOJO is a satire-based participatory toolkit designed to help young adults engage with emotionally heavy societal topics through humor, absurdity, and collaborative dialogue. Through workshops, playtesting, and visual experimentation, the project explores how satire can create emotional distance that encourages discussion rather than disengagement.
We are constantly surrounded by heavy societal topics through news, social media, and online culture. Over time this can create emotional fatigue, where difficult subjects begin to feel overwhelming rather than engaging. Instead of encouraging conversation, the constant exposure can lead to avoidance and disengagement. Through this project I explored how satire and collaborative play could be used to make these conversations feel more approachable, open, and emotionally manageable.
Satire allows difficult topics to be approached from a different angle. By exaggerating, reframing, and sometimes making situations absurd, humor can reduce some of the emotional pressure surrounding heavy conversations. Rather than avoiding these subjects entirely, participants were encouraged to engage with them through play, discussion, and collaborative interpretation. The goal was not to make fun of serious issues, but to create space where people could reflect on them in a more approachable and less overwhelming way.
The final outcome took the form of a participatory card-based toolkit where players collaboratively create satirical scenarios around societal topics. The system is built around different categories of cards, including topic, perspective, voice, and format cards, which together generate unexpected combinations and discussions. As the rounds progress, the scenarios often become more absurd and exaggerated, encouraging participants to think creatively, reflect critically, and build ideas together through humor and conversation.
Throughout the project I organized workshops and playtesting sessions in different social environments, including classrooms, cafés, and game nights. Watching participants interact with the toolkit provided valuable insights into how satire, humor, and collaboration could encourage conversation around difficult topics. Many discussions naturally moved beyond the cards themselves, creating moments of reflection, shared experiences, and collective laughter.
The project showed me that satire can function as more than entertainment or criticism. Through collaborative play and discussion, humor became a way for participants to approach difficult societal topics together rather than avoiding them. The most valuable outcome was not the final artifacts themselves, but the moments of dialogue, reflection, and shared understanding created through the system.
