EventyrBriller

Cultural Journey

EventyrBriller is a journey from normal everyday life, to a colourful universe with deep meaning. A journey from 2D to 3D with the mission of cultural understanding. Maximum inputs achieves by creative and interactive learning. To feel the closeness to each other EventyrBriller educate children and teenagers to reduce the cultural differences and maintain excitement about places in the world that they never been even though news are dark about them.

The way we learn is outdated and not human-centric. Our previous idea of repetition and memorisation increases knowledge has to end. Cooperative creativity, which means failing and mastering together, builds tomorrow’s bridges for development and, not least, break down the polarisation of society. Collective creativity promotes mega trends such as globalisation, digitalisation and problem solving. Today’s problems require cooperation, and the ability to cooperate. With the help of Eventyrbriller VR Headsets, we will be able to offer a completely new learning platform where integration and equality are the key. it gives a kind of closeness, which is difficult to achieve. Children feel safe in a fantasy world. When they sing and dance they feel a certain belonging to each other.

Where does it started?

This Project is introduced by Æra strategic innovation company.

NFF, OBOS, Norsk Tipping and ÆRA have entered into a collaboration to prevent children and young people from falling outside of society. When someone falls outside socially, culturally, physically or financially, it is not only demanding and potentially destructive for the individual, it is a great challenge for society. Socially exclusion must be prevented from early ages.

Research

Early researches were focused on what socially rejection or exclusion really means and what are the main causes. Among all the researches it was shocking to discover that most children with feeling of not included are immigrants. But considering the main reasons which comes further, immigrant children participate significantly in the categories.

What causes the exclusion:

• Religion: Most likely kids with strong religion believes are getting bullied
• Unemployed parents: The feeling of parents are not successful enough causes embarrassment
• Poorness: More than 50% of children from families with weak economy in Norway are immigrants. Not being able to participate in different activities or having similar cloths or equipments like the others cause the parents can not effort it, are huge struggling for children.
• Health issue: No need to say how physical and mental illness separates kids from others
• lack of Network and knowledge of new society: Most of the kids that move to new society feel they do not have enough information on what is trendy on kids lifestyle. From the street language and dress code to the activities and social life, every thing can be challenging for newcomers.

Historically, since the 1970s, there have been great wave of immigrants, mostly labor immigrants. Norway was very open to the idea and embraced them immediately’, as Norway at that time was in an economic upswing and needed labor. Over the decades, Norway’s view of immigrants became more negative, both from politics and from Norwegians’ side. This took place mainly in the 90s which Norway started to take in asylum seekers and refugees for the first time. We still experience that much of the attitudes.

So we decided to put our focus on Socially excluded international children which covers more than 50% of the target group.

Feeling their emotions

We felt the need to enter into a dialogue with several people from the public, private and voluntary sectors who had experienced or close observation of the subject. A great range of actors join to the conversation from young people that had been excluded as a child to the friends, family members and teachers and beyond that many people from various public and volunteer organisations such as UN, Red Cross, NAV and UDI. Gathering the information and empathy with the users were full of exhausting emotions included sorrow, grief, anger and disappointment. Even though the subject was heavy but we had this feeling that information must be acknowledged by every body on daily basis.

From the impressions, the first concern was the language which was a great struggle for immigrants during years. But during last decade the ministry of education and research published an educational act that makes public schools to have a year of Norwegian course for children that moved to Norway recently. The package called velkomstklasse and it helps international kids to learn the language and keep up their education like other kids in their age so they do not miss a year. Researches showed the package is a great success and according to our conversation with the international children, we find out they appreciate it a lot.

The second concern was free or low price activities. Parents with low income considered it hard or impossible to pay monthly or annually for different activity clubs for their children and the children with exclusion background were agree on that after-school activities are the best way to find friend and feel included. But again now a days it finds lots and lots of volunteer organisations that offer good quality activities on low price or free of charge.

By getting deeper, It seems the darkest outstanding problem is that we judge each other based on wrong informations. The news shows the dark side of every thing, Poverty of Africa, war in middle east or terror attack in USA and Europe are not the real information of normal people daily life. Kids are similar in every where in many was, they enjoy singing and dancing, they love to play outside, they get friend, play with each other and laugh together easily no matter which culture they come from.

Where is the Problem and what is our vision?

How to prevent the exclusion by powering up cultures of all countries? It is crucial to learn the children that their identity is their power and no matter where they come from they have lots to share. Each culture has its uniqueness and by a virtual journey we can enlighten every day life and culture of each wonderful country.

Further Information

• This project is done by 5 students in Høyskolen Kristiania to practice the Design Thinking aspects under supervising of Heidi Eva Back.
• All the photos that are not sketched or taken by team are from unsplash.com