ABOUT

This was a personal project of which the initial concept and development started during my MA in Illustration and which I then continued to develop and finalise before looking for crowdfunding to launch the product into production. The brief I set myself was to create a board game that supports physical, cognitive, language, emotional and social development, but also laying the foundation of spiritual awareness and connection beyond the physical body.

Although my background is in art and design after the birth of my son in 2010 I completed an international diploma in Montessori Pedagogy before working in both Montessori and mainstream settings with children between the ages of 2-11 years. Over the course of these 10 years, I became increasingly disillusioned with mainstream education being drawn back to exploring alternative learning modalities. During the MA alongside child development my interest in psychology, spirituality and consciousness grew. I explored this in a map project during a module on visual language where I focused on healing through a shamanic journey, using chakras as a visual aid to represent lost and restored energy. Towards the end of this project, I started to see the foundations of a board game.

As I’ve been transitioning back into the art and design world I’ve found my work is drawn to help support children’s holistic development and support adult-child engagement. I’ve been doing this through developing illustrated storybooks and interactive activities. For this project I wanted to take the traditional element of competition out of the game and create a board game where the players support each other through the challenges to get to the end of the game together.

Although the project didn’t get funding to go into production I’ve learnt so much from the process and although its currently shelved I’m still exploring avenues through talking to people in the industry, A big issue I found when marketing the product as a game was that it is so different to other products in the board game genre. I’m looking at other avenues including holistic toolkits and home schooling as options to consider in the future.