Skateboard

How do you engage a fifteen year old to talk about stereotypes and assumptions? This was a question I asked while volunteering with a group of SouthEast Asian teenagers in 2007. Over the course of eight months, I designed and facilitated workshops, activities and objects that helped us talk about topics related to community, identity and race. Building this odd looking skateboard provided the opportunity for us to discuss what might happen if somebody were to design something for you without really knowing much about you aside from their own assumptions. Sometimes objects can be used to provoke conversations early in a creative process and don’t always come at the end.