We wanted to involve children and young people in CUIDAR right from the start so where better than the creative process leading to the project logo? Informal drawing sessions were held in Lisbon schools, with the participation of children from the 5th and the 6th grade (10 to 12 years old).
To implement the competition we contacted Associação Bandeira Azul da Europa (ABAE), an environmental education association that works with a permanent network of schools in Portugal. ABAE sent out a call to the teachers in the network. Thirteen schools registered their interest, and three from different geographical areas around Lisbon were selected, ensuring social diversity among the participants.
In order to collect a sufficient number of drawings and capture the interest of the students, two classes were selected in each school to participate in the competition.
A ‘jury’ was put together to select the winner, composed of Fernando Mendes (CEO of CoworkLisboa); Margarida Gomes (Coordinator of ABAE); Lara Seixo Rodrigues (architect, art director, urban art curator) and Luísa Schmidt (researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences and member of the CUIDAR team).
Fernando Mendes and Ana Rita Lança, both designers from CoworkLisboa, offered to collaborate with the design of the logo, first by creating a template to be used in classroom, and second by designing the logo based on the wining drawing.
Consent was obtained from all the children and parents involved. At the end of May two members of the ICS team went to each school. At the start of each session, a short talk was given about CUIDAR and a short discussion led with the children about what makes a disaster. The children were then given a simple template and asked to make a drawing to be used as a basis of the CUIDAR logo. Children had freedom to choose the subject they wanted to draw and the material they wanted to use to make the drawing.
The drawing sessions
We collected 124 drawings which covered a wide range of topics. Particular themes came up more frequently, for example volcanoes, floods, fires, earthquakes and asteroids crashing into the earth, but there were also themes about topics such as sadness and bullying. All drawings were uploaded onto a Tumblr blog so the children could have access to them. All participating children and teachers received a small gift for their participation. The three winners were given an educational game and a science kit from the Portuguese toy company Science4you as a prize.
The jury then selected two drawings, one that was simpler and stylized and more like a logo, and one that was more identifiable with a child’s image of disasters, cartoonish and expressing different forms of disaster, with interesting colours and composition. The latter was then chosen by the CUIDAR consortium at its first meeting in London, to be the official project logo. The consortium members were very impressed with the quality and range of the drawings as a whole.
The chosen drawing
The CoworkLisboa design team generated a logo faithful to the original idea whilst offering professional layout and flexibility. The outcome includes five different versions of the logo: one image of the original drawing (four disasters), and four images depicting each separate disaster.
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