Beyond Earth
Learning the importance of inclusive play in refugee camps… from extraterrestrials.
With support from the IKEA Foundation, Humanity & Inclusion enables 13,000 children in refugee camps in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand to learn and develop through play in a safe environment and trains parents and community volunteers to stimulate children from infancy, as part of their Growing Together project.
Our role was to create an inclusive children’s story book as a tool for displaced children, caregivers and those around them to learn more about each other and how to interact.
With
Humanity & Inclusion
Objective
Get displaced children and caregivers up to speed on attitudes and behaviours towards including children with different abilities, to help all children have equal opportunities to develop and reach their potential.
Demographic
Children and caregivers in refugee camps in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand
Types of work
Research & Evaluation, Workshops & Facilitation, Behaviour Change, Storytelling, Illustration, Design, Translation.
Themes
Youth Empowerment, Diversity & Inclusion, Child Protection.
Research & Strategy
Following mass influxes of refugees Humanity & Inclusion have been running humanitarian, health, inclusion and rehabilitation interventions in Bangladesh, Thailand, and Pakistan. As part of these interventions, Growing Together helps children learn and develop through play, arts, games, sports, culture and early years education and helps parents and caregivers stimulate children from infancy.
To help us come up with relatable characters, and to give our target demographic a role and agency in the project, we ran prototyping sessions with vulnerable children and children with disabilities in three of our target refugee camps. These play sessions formed the prototypes for the diverse amorphous forms and characters with special powers—living beyond earth’s borders—for the book.
Play is vital, not just for kids, but for all of us. Why? Because when we spark play, we connect, create, recharge, escape and explore.
In refugee contexts, this can also mean a chance to share traumatising experiences, or to express themselves when words are not available.
These human-centred design steps gave us a better idea of what would resonate with our young demographic, gave them more agency and self-efficacy, and was also a good excuse to have fun with plasticine.
These are our characters at prototype stage:
Creative
A creative concept around aliens was selected following testing. Aliens live outside of our usual world. They are different colours and they might move or speak or think or act differently from us. They may be feared or welcomed, but they are always interesting, awe-inspiring or magical.
The author and art director, Karen, also loves aliens.
Early character drafts
Colour palette and thumbnails
Silhouette tests
A few of the characters
Production
The final book was translated into the six most prevalent readable languages in the refugee camps we were targeting.
Then the text was annotated with a symbol-based language to give people with learning difficulties (or those with low literacy in the language used) an alternative or accompanying text.
Colour checking during the print production process in a break from lockdown.
You can learn (even) more about this whole process on Karen’s instagram.
“Like aliens, kids come in many shapes and forms. Some can have strengths and difficulties. Some can have visible and invisible disabilities. Some might need more help than others but even if we are all different from each other, we can all play together in harmony. And just like these aliens, we must celebrate each other’s difference that make life more fun and unique.”
-Foreword to book
