Trove is a physical and digital tool that enables children and young people to be in control of their own life story. It combines a multi-media storying app and bag designed for adding stories to objects. Keeping safe the objects and their connected stories, trove uses simple digital technologies to bring them back to life, time after time. CenSoF Senior Research Associate, Lisa May Thomas, explains how she – together with fellow University of Bristol researcher Dr Stuart Gray – took trove to the Abrechian woodland activity centre in the forest near to Loch Ness and Inverness earlier this year.
In April this year, we took trove up to Scotland as part of a 3-day residential with a group of care-experienced children and young people and their families who live in Glasgow, and who have a long-term relationship with The Articulate Cultural Trust and Hub. Articulate is a charity based in Glasgow, who support dynamic platforms for arts projects, programmers and producers who wish to create amazing creative experiences for children, young people, and adults, especially for those who experience barriers to participation.
Previously, trove had been used in indoor spaces, in homes and classrooms, and during the trip we wanted to explore how trove might be used in the outdoors – in the wild spaces of the forest of Abrechian, and as part of the woodland activities that were taking place with the families there (run by the outdoor activity leaders and Articulate).
“Whilst trove was designed to care for children and young people, through supporting their life-stories, the children and young people started to care for trove”
trove had been designed and used previously as a way to explore life stories with objects with care-experienced children and young people, to create stories with trove using objects that have personal histories and to use trove to trigger and reflect on those stories and memories. As part of using trove over the course of the residential, we wanted to think about how we might use trove to capture and story the present moment of the children’s and young people’s experiences in the site, rather than focussing on their past memories. We were also interested in thinking about different futures with trove: how we might use trove to speculate about future stories, what it might be like to return to the stories we collect in trove in the future, and the ways in which trove was holding the objects and their stories for the future.
Lastly, rather than the use of trove as an individual storying venture, we were thinking about how to use trove with groups of children, within a social setting, in collective explorations of storying their experiences.
trove in the wild
We took trove to ‘secret’ and ‘interesting’ spaces and places in the environment, and along to some of the activities that were taking place, to capture stories, about these sites and features of them. At the start of the trip, Stu and I began facilitating the use of trove, with invitations and prompts for objects and stories, and with instructions on how to use trove. This shifted over the course of the time we had together, with the children and young people becoming the new custodians of trove, supporting, prompting, and guiding each other with their stories for trove.
trove also went on a sleepover on the second night, to the camping pods where the families were staying. We still don’t know what trove got up to that night! trove became a verb, a doing word, ‘to trove’ – ‘we are going to go and trove it…’ and ‘are you troving now?’
troving also became something which assembled us together in activity, an assembling of bodies, and things and environments. The young people took on roles in troving – holding trove, prompting stories, being a trove bodyguard (power trove), using the camera to story and document the troving that was taking place. These assemblages encouraged the young people to engage, with trove and with the environments we were in, and with each other in physical and multi-sensory engagement.
One my favourite moments of the trip was when we captured ‘the story of the Burn’, passing trove over the water, squatting, and balancing our bodies, dangling the microphone over the water to capture its sound as the story in trove.
Planting trees, we worked together to tell trove the names and stories of the trees, placing an NFC sticker on the tree, augmenting the yet to grow woodland into trove, trove into the woodland.
Lots of questions were asked by the young people about the trove design, with ideas for future troves. These often centred around the touch and materiality of trove, adding additional sensory components to trove, and also the ways in which the young people could care for trove in the environment, for example, designing and making trove a raincoat. We talked about future spaces and places trove could inhabit with them, these were social spaces – such as their schools, and outdoor spaces they knew.
On an end note, something that was interesting to observe was that, whilst trove was designed to care for children and young people, through supporting their life-stories, during the trip, the children and young people started to care for trove. And to consider and care for the spaces around them, and each other with trove. This came across in the ways in which they talked about and moved with trove, the gestures of care towards trove. Sitting next to, holding, hugging, patting, stroking. trove was sentient and a friend/companion. They were making stories about trove.
Re-configured as a sociodigital object of care, trove enabled an assembling of relations between us, the researchers, the young people and their families, and the environments we were in, enabling memory-making in situated, embodied and multi-sensory ways.
The original intention of trove was to enable care-experienced children and young people to have more autonomy over their life stories, which are typically owned by social workers and agencies, with narrowed pathways and possibilities for futures. Disrupting these harmful future-making claims, trove enables creativity, imagination, and agency for those young people, giving them more authorship of their past, present and future lives, and how they chose to story (and embody) their own temporal experiences in sociodigtal entanglements
I am looking forward to returning to talk with the young people that engaged with trove in Abrechian, to find out whether and how they remember their trip and trove, the stories – of the burn and the tree planting. Whether there’s a remembered physicality, sense of togetherness, the activity of assembling; whether the sound of the burn prompts a story, and what that is. Perhaps we, or they, could return to the trees in the future, to remember their names and to add to their stories.
About trove
trove was co-designed with previous stakeholders, including young children, with previous AHRC funding, UoB researchers and artist-maker Chloe Meineck (Studio Meineck): https://studiomeineck.com/trove/
More information
To keep up-to-date with the work of the Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), visit our website.