Creativeworks London—the knowledge exchange hub connecting researchers and small enterprises in London—has awarded a Creative Voucher to Tessa Whitehouse (QMUL) and Emilie Giles (Codasign) for a six-month project called Making Friends that connects cultural and material history research with digital making activities to enable participatory research with children.

This new partnership between humanities researchers at QMUL, the East London-based Codasign, and Stoke Newington School (a Media Arts College) will use creative technologies to explore friendship in its past and present forms.

Children from Year 7 at Stoke Newington School will join Tessa and Emilie in exploring objects relating to friendship, discussing experiences of friendship, and making games, musical instruments, and stories using open source interactive design and coding tools including Scratch and MaKey MaKey.

The research questions for the project emerge from Tessa’s work on cultures of friendship. They are intellectual and practical, historical and contemporary:

• What does ‘friendship’ mean today, what has it meant in the past?
• What is the emotional and practical experience of friendship in childhood?
• How can children use creative technologies to a) understand historical factors around friendship b) share knowledge?
• Can children, creative SMEs, design professionals, and museums participate in academic research?

For news about this and other Codasign projects, visit the website: http://codasign.com/

And to find out more about Tessa’s research: http://www.sed.qmul.ac.uk/staff/whitehouset.html

For Creative Works London:

http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/

http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/creative_voucher/codasign-queen-mary-university-of-london/