Podcast season 5: Episode 3 – Exploring The Vault: a digital tool for life story work

Please note that this transcript is auto-generated and therefore will contain some errors and natural pauses in conversation.

Dawn: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Creative Life Story Work podcast. Your regular dose of life story work inspiration. Every month we bring you life story work, ideas, tools, and honest insights from a range of perspectives. Stay connected to the latest thinking in life story work as we talk to people with lived experience, practitioners, local authorities, carers, and people who are shaping the way we help care experienced children and young people make sense of their past and build a brighter future.

Today we are chatting with two incredible artists who’ve been working together on a creative research project with care leavers.

[00:01:00] Together they have explored how a digital tool can help young people store and share important memories, documents, and stories. We’ll hear what it was like working as a team from different organisations, what they learned from each other and the group and how it’s shaped their practice going forward.

So it’s my utter delight to welcome to the podcast studio Ruth Mary Johnson and Rosie Reid, a very warm welcome to our studio.

Ruth and Rosie: Hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us.

Dawn: Ah, really, really lovely to see you. We’re

Rosie: We’re big fans. We’re big big fans,

Dawn: I wondered if you would each like to introduce yourselves and share a little about your background and the organisation that you are working with.

Rosie, would you like to go first?

[00:02:00] Rosie: Yeah, no problem. Hi everyone, everyone listening. My name is Rosie Reid. I’m a multidisciplinary artist, I suppose, but my background is in theatre. And that’s why I feel like me and Ruth were quite a good match. So I’m a theatre maker and applied artist.

I work in lots of different kind of communities around Scotland, mostly kinda co-creating art with different groups of people. I suppose throughout my career I’ve specialized in working within criminal justice settings and most recently I’ve been working mostly in residential care. But on this project, I’ve been delighted to work with Articulate Cultural Trust, who I’m one of their quality teaching artists there, and I’ve been working alongside them to kind of think about their life story work and how we could maybe develop a strand of that within their organization or not. I don’t know.

[00:03:00] This is what we’re gonna talk about today, an experiment that we undertook together. So, yeah, Articulate Cultural Trust, if you haven’t heard of them before, are a brilliant organization working across Scotland.

We’ve got lots of different communities we engage with, but mostly young people who have been in the care system doing lots of different projects. But I don’t want to get into all of them ’cause I could spend our whole time talking about all of that but you should look them up if you’ve never heard of them before.

Brilliant. I’ll pass on to Ruth.

Dawn: Thank you, Ruth.

Ruth: Hello. So I’m Ruth. I am also a theatre maker, but then I always feel like I have to then go, I’m a theatre maker that does this, this, this, this, this, this, this. I always try and I think, oh, it’s a really short way of saying what I do, and then it never is ’cause there’s a whole paragraph of things. But I perform and I direct and I write, but a lot of my time is also facilitating groups to do those things and tell the stories that they want to share with the world and their groups.

[00:04:00] Different groups that I work with range from teeny tinies to taller people in lots of different settings. So it could be in settings that are often not seen as playful places. So that could be hospitals, it could be prisons, it could be places that you might not imagine play to happen. So that’s the un-succinct version of what I do, but I’ve been a Blue Cabin associate artist since 2021. I started working with Blue Cabin on All About Me, the Creative Life Story Work pilot really, I guess, and then went on to pilot another project using the idea of All About Me with care leavers and that was called All About Us. And I think that was one of the reasons that Rosie and I were sort of match made together as a pairing was sort of that experience but also like we both use the term theatre maker and, and I think we are interested in like how best to create environments where people can tell the stories they want to tell.

Dawn: Thank you. Thank you, Ruth. Just going down tangent boulevard, but when somebody asks me, what do you do? Oh, I’m a facilitator. A bit like you. Like, what’s that? Oh, I share your pain. I sometimes wish I was a plumber. If I was a plumber. It’d be a lot easier!

Rosie, you described what we’re gonna talk about today as an experiment. So would you like to tell us about the project that you’ve been working on? What was the aim of it and how did it come about?

Rosie: So, Articulate Cultural Trust, have a platform online: The Articulate Hub. And it’s got a few different strands that exist within it.

[00:06:00] One of those strands is called the Vault, and this was something that was co-designed with young people who had been through the care system, and it basically is a tool… it came outta conversations around young people’s memory boxes and how often young people’s memories, physical objects that they’ve had, can become misplaced throughout their different placements.

And that being, you know, something that was really tricky for some of the young people. They were talking about a need for a space to hold important documents, you know, a place where they could save really important documents and have them to hand for a lot of different kinda administrative tasks in their life that would make it so much easier.

[00:07:00] So basically what happened was Articulate, co-designed this app, it’s called The Vault, and in partnership with yourselves Blue Cabin, they decided that they needed to figure out how could this actually be used – this vault, could we use this vault to do some kind of life story work?

Inspired by the work that you are already delivering, but, you know, a completely separate thing. So that’s kind of where the project came from. You could probably speak more about that, Dawn because I wasn’t involved in that but – I kind of came in with Ruth when me and Ruth got to work together.

The point of our collaboration was we’re gonna bring some young researchers together and we’re gonna figure out what is this thing? The vault? What is that? I don’t know what that is. Yeah. And let’s experiment with it in a creative way

Dawn: Brilliant. So you’re coming from different organisations, different artistic backgrounds. So what was that like working together?

[00:08:00] How did you begin working together?

Ruth: Well, we met online, didn’t we? Because we are like – I’m here in Whitley Bay. You are up the road, Rosie, in Scotland. And we were brought together as buddies, which is something that Blue Cabin does a lot. I’ve had a few buddy pairings and it’s always been really, really valuable. We both came into the experiment kind of like, oh, we don’t know what this is and what this could be and how we might go about it.

And I actually think as scary as that was in the beginning, I actually think that was real positive for the experiment because we, with the amazing group of young researchers that we worked with. We were all in the same place. It wasn’t that we had more knowledge of how this could work or not work.

[00:09:00] We were all starting at the same block and, and actually we met a few times online, didn’t we, Rosie? And, and sort of going, oh, how are we gonna do this? What tone do we wanna set? What are the sort of key questions that we wanna explore, but we actually thought that our first stage needed to be about being playful, being experimental, like using the platform in whatever way we wanted to.

So we had an initial session, didn’t we, to find out a little bit more about the vault alongside the group of young researchers. And we had a little play with it on online together.

Rosie: Yeah. We kind of had Jason from Articulate who gave us a run through.

We all got access. Obviously there’s a lot of stages to gain access. It’s very restricted, which is obviously very important. But just making sure everyone was comfortable with the technology before we started.

[00:10:00] And I think what Ruth said is really important that, you know, it was quite good that as a creative team, as the lead artists on this, we didn’t know this convention, we didn’t know what the vault was. So it allowed us to be really creative and explore as well. And also that the young researchers hadn’t been involved in the design. You know what it’s like if you make anything – I’m not precious, but if I’ve made something, you hold onto some parts of it, you’re like, ‘oh no, but that came from this conversation, that’s why we designed it like that.’ We didn’t have any of that. So it was really helpful for us. We could really just start and look at it like with a totally fresh pair of eyes. And as Ruth says, and I love what you said at the beginning Ruth about, you know, working in environments that are intrinsically, not very playful, but sometimes those environments are the places that need to be the most playful.

[00:11:00] And I think what was cool about working with The Vault as an app is that it’s not completely playful, but it’s about how you play with it. And that’s what the experiment was all about – like setting some really creative tasks and seeing if it could work.

Ruth: Yeah. Because that was the next stage, wasn’t it? So we met before Christmas  – sort of explaining as much of what we didn’t know as what  did know.

But by this stage we said we’re gonna have a play with this for about six weeks. So we’re gonna have a weekly challenge, creative challenge that was actually really open-ended in terms of how you responded to it. And the only stipulation was that you put it in the vault, and and you didn’t have to share it – in the same way that in, in a session we always say you can share as much or as little as you like. If somebody wanted to share what they’d put in the vault, they absolutely could, but they didn’t have to.

[00:12:00] And there is something very special about how private this online space is. Nobody else has access to what is in there. So yeah, we did this six weeks worth of creative challenges and then we got together to sort of go, what was that like?

And I think you what Rosie said there about it’s like how you play and it was, that’s what we were really interested in and is like how people were responding to the tasks, how they found the platform to use like technically as well as like experientially, is that the right word? Have I made a word up? I think that’s a word.

Rosie: Experiential. It’s allowed. That’s perfect.

Rosie: I think it’s really important just while you’re talking about the experiments stage. So we met with everyone. We did the experiment, and then we came back to kinda discuss what was that like? All of the tasks were influenced by the All About Me process. So alongside this project, I’ve been training as a therapeutic life story worker on the Rose model.

[00:13:00] So using that training and also Ruth kind of pulling in on all of her expertise with Blue Cabin’s All About Me work. We decided that we’d use the All About Me framework as the way to create creative tasks.

So it was very light touch, but it was just dipping our toe into introducing life story work and that kind of initial starting point in a playful way.

Ruth: Yeah. And I think all while we were, so yeah, those tasks were all very inspired by the themes of All About Me, weren’t they? And we were so conscious that because these tasks were being done on your own at any point during the week, we wanted to make them safe as well. Because the creative tasks weren’t being undertaken within a facilitated session.

[00:14:00] So that was like always like a constant thought process we were always going through of like, how can we dip our tow into some of these themes in a really careful way.

Dawn: Let’s go to a break so you can hear about our Creative Life Story Work membership offer.

Trailer: ‘We want people to gain more of an understanding about what it’s like to be care experienced and to have a better understanding of what it actually means.’ Could Creative Life Story Work make a difference to the care experienced children and young people you work with? Maybe you are a social worker. ‘I think we forget at our peril that actually telling a child the story of their early life is one of the most profound uses of social work power that we could ever operate.’

Perhaps you are a foster carer. ‘You know, when they say it’s all about the child, it’s not because in our experience, it’s about the carer and the child, and it just gives a new angle to our relationship because we’re learning about each other together.’

[00:15:00] A Creative Life story work membership will give you or your whole team access to resources including activities you can use in direct work with children and young people, training with life story work experts and lots more. ‘And I think a lot of our children are looking for meaning, looking for, you know, well why is it I feel this way when my, you know, my friends don’t. Why is it I get angry internally and my friends don’t? The greatest thing we see is when we are able to say to young people, this is your story. This is about who you are. And then children towards the end say, ‘it’s not my fault that these things happened, but it is something that I can do something about’. And once we have that, then we know we can move forward.’

Find out about our membership for individuals and for organizations on our website, Creativelifestorywork.com.

[00:16:00] Dawn: Rosie, you talked about completing the life story work qualification. I’m wondering  about completing that work whilst doing this research. Did that approach challenge or deepen any of the creative methods that you were both using?

RosieL So I’m not fully trained yet. Dawn, we must not get ahead of ourselves here! Nearly, very, very close. I suppose the practice of therapeutic life story work is so intensive that it was probably really good for me to have that working alongside that because I could keep checking in with where we were going, but also asking really helpful questions and already critiquing things, you know. Because you don’t know what’s gonna come out before you do this kinda work, right? Like you have no idea what lid you might open up with someone if you ask a simple question like, what would be your ideal birthday party?

[00:17:00] And that’s one of the creative tasks we did. It’s huge for some people. Everything that I was learning in terms of the theory behind therapeutic life story work and that kind of in intervention was totally helpful in this. And what was really helpful was to bring that to the young people. So what happened was after we did this experiment, we both Ruth and I presented Blue Cabin’s creative life story work, and we presented the Rose model of  therapeutic life story work practice, to basically be like – here’s two models of practice. And then what was really helpful is we got Chloe who came and presented the trove to them as well, which was amazing.

Ruth: When Chloe from the Trove came into our session and explored the development of  their project, which is these beautiful tactile bags where you can record sound and attach them to objects like that.

[00:18:00] The process of that has been like, I think 13 years she said, and actually, all along the way it is like trying it out, testing the young people, informing the next stage of development.

Rosie: They got to see, you know, different models of practice to go, right: this is like some incredible work that’s already happening. Where does the vault sit in terms of life story work? Now that you’ve had to think about that? What, what’s the potential? What’s the limitations? And that was really great. So that was really, really helpful.

Dawn: Ruth, thinking about what Rosie said and your collaboration working together, but in the sessions with the young researchers, I wondered if there’d been any particular moments or breakthroughs that stood out to you?

Ruth: Well, the group were incredible.

[00:19:00] We, we just had a, a small group of three young people who were zooming in from all over Scotland.

Rosie: Very rural as well. Very rural.

Ruth: And it really made me think about the pilot that we did for all About us with the care leavers looking at an All About Me model the power of the group and how important that was – and they were incredible. They were incredibly open. They were incredibly ready to question, ready to ask big questions as well. Yeah, just the sort of brilliance of the group in general and, and how playful they were. And there were some lovely moments. There was a session that we delivered where I’d sent packs out to make mini shadow theaters, and that was just a lovely moment. Like one of the group was like, I’m gonna go and continue making an epic opera or something – I think it was a musical thing she was doing.

[00:20:00] Actually the willingness to play was really lovely. It really did feel like creative research – the whole project. And I think we all appreciated those times that we had together, where we would sort of try things out individually, but then come together and sort of reflect on how we found things and just in a really honest way as well.

Because this was never about going. ‘This is the answer and we need to make sure that we get to the answer’. It was like almost working out what the questions were as well sometimes, so we started with some questions and then it shifted and changed in response to the responses of the group.

[00:21:00] Dawn: And how do you think working with the young researchers on the trove will influence your future work, either individually or collaboratively?

Rosie: Do you want to go first Ruth? Go on

Ruth: I just think it is that thing of you can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but unless the people who it’s meant to be used for, unless they’re involved in the process of making that into a reality, then it’s kind of, is it worth doing? You know? And then I think it’s just like having those voices in the process of creating a process is so not just valuable, I think it’s vital. Especially when you’re thinking about digital technologies. It is not a cheap way of doing things and so to speed ahead with something that might then not be useful or not be used – the voices of the people who something’s being made for are essential.

[00:22:00] And I think the other part of the question was about future collaborations. I mean, I really, genuinely think that Rosie and I didn’t know each other at all and would never have met without doing this experiment. And I’ve just learned so much from her as well.

Rosie: I’ve learned so much from working with you Ruth, honestly.

Ruth: It’s a bit of a love-in, but also just, it’s all true. Like walking alongside you as you’ve been doing the diploma and just being in awe of just you as a woman anyway, like with little ones and doing that and doing this and just bringing your brilliant self every single time.

[00:23:00] There’s something about the learning as well – I think I’ve always believed that we never stop learning, but that’s been a real privilege to be your little buddy down the road, hearing about that journey that you’re going on as well and it’s been really inspiring.

Rosie: I honestly feel like Ruth, that is very kind of you to say, but you’re also doing like about a million things that all constantly inspiring me when I’m speaking to her. I’m like, ‘you’re doing what today? What? That looks amazing.’ But I think that is one thing that I agree with. I feel really lucky to have made a collaborator with you and I hope this isn’t the end.

I’ve said it before, but I think it’s always good to meet people working within the same kind of field as you. With the same passion and like wanting to make a difference. Whenever we find other practitioners doing that, it feels special.  I think for me, what I’ll take forward from this experiment is I do agree with what Ruth’s brought to the table, but I also think that working digitally, I’ve not done loads of stuff that I’ve felt has been amazing digitally, but I feel like this felt like a really authentic process even though it was digital.

[00:24:00] And I think, yeah, I’m not scared of it like I was before maybe of like doing something online that that still feels like you can hold the space. And I think you guys do that really well. So I feel like I’ve learned that from you.

And I think for Articulate, this has been so helpful because Iona, and everyone there, you know, they have taken their time. They do take their time for a reason, you know, because they do consult with their young people and their young people are so part of their vision and how they move forward.

But it takes time and I think that can sometimes be frustrating when you want things to get off the ground. One thing that I think this experiment has really helped us do is to figure out that The Vault has a place as a tool in some kind of life story work, life story journey projects perhaps in the future for Articulate.

[00:25:00]  But it definitely has opened up more questions. But that’s what it should do. If you’re gonna make something that’s working in this realm, you need to think about it before you do it ’cause it’s too important and there’s too much at stake. So I think that’s what’s been really helpful. And we actually brought the findings back to the team and Articulate invited some people who work with young people in Scotland doing life story work already.

And it just felt a really really supportive group of people, you know, and that’s what we’ve had in Blue Cabin as our partners, you know. People just trying to help each other make good work because at a time where, you know, things are being cut and we need to band together.

[00:26:00] That’s what it’s all about – you want the work to be happening and you want the young people who need it to have it, you know? I think that’s the main thing.

Dawn: And to finish our conversation today, my final question is if you could summarize your collaboration in three words, what would they be? You can have three words each. What would they be?

Ruth: Team.

Rosie: I like that.

Ruth: Playful

Rosie: Giggles can we do the giggles? I feel like giggles is good as playful. So we’ll do our three all together. So team giggles or giggling or like the laughter, something like that. And then, I don’t know Ruth I think we need a word that’s like, we’ve had a lot of moments where we’re like really trying to figure things out.

Ruth: Conundrums? Puzzle? Team playful puzzle?

Rosie: a giggly puzzle team. It sounds like a pub quiz name, but I kinda like it.

Dawn: Say it again?

Rosie: Giggle Puzzle team.

Dawn: The Giggle Puzzle Team, thank you for our conversation, giggle Puzzle team, and giving us such a unique insight into the nature of your collaboration and how you’ve played together with the young researchers. Thank you very much.

Whether you are a foster carer, someone who has experience with the care system, or you work with children and young people, we hope this episode has given you an insight into how we can make life story work better for young people and how you can use it in your own practice.

[00:28:00] You can find out more about Creative Life Story work on our website, creativelifestorywork.com, and you can find us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky at CreativeLSW.

Please do get in touch there with any comments or questions as we’d really love to hear from you. And if your podcast app allows you, please do leave us a review as it really helps others to find our show. So until next month, bye for now.