Flag: A shared horizon

The Flag workshop explores visual and multisensory thinking as an internal process for the University of Lapland’s fashion, textile art and material study students and artist-researchers (authors). The students verbalised and visualised their ideas, thoughts and feelings, which led to the initial ideas and material experiments being transformed into sketches. This culminated in the Flag: A Shared Horizon installation. The colourful and kinetic installation Net, emerging from Flag, mirrors the shared horizons of youth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting extended global lockdowns. The installation came about in Agora Hall in the F-Wing of the University of Lapland. Both Flag and Nets are metaphors that look beyond the obvious challenges youth have faced during the pandemic, redefining their diverse understandings of hope, fear, needs and what constitutes novel ideas what they want in the future. Thinking towards the unknown can reveal insights into the underlying narratives, while arts-based methods can open up new approaches to the different challenges faced by society. Net will represent the portrait of the participating youth from December 2021 to February 2022. The objective of the workshop was to provide these youth with knowledge about pluralism and how to apply it in their (re)design thinking. It was a process for applying a lens of pluralism to a real youth-based workshop, solving problems by prioritising their (the participants’) needs above all else and sharing what they learned in the workshop.