Stimulating reading interest in youth

This conceptual project was created for the Public Library of the State of Rio de Janeiro. We were a core team of 2 people and our challenge was to find ways to encourage youth to be more interested in reading, thus expanding their repertoire. We had as a resource a new platform of library content access, which could be used as a touchpoint in the solution.

After doing quick research and interviews with youth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we created a prototype of a platform that aims at sensitizing and allowing young users to discover content (aesthetic approximations) through symbolic correlations with their own interests, thus stimulating them in their own autonomous search for knowledge. 

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The design criteria included:

• Stimulate curiosity, serendipity;
• Be close to the type of platforms youth value and engage with, speak the same language;
• Be close to the popular and young language and cultural interests, but making symbolic correlations between their own interests and content from the library;
• Stimulate self-learning through creative actions.

Important conceptual and strategic characteristics:

• Symbolic correlations. The content suggested by the platform is related to the users’ symbolic interests (Peripheral learning).
• Self-representation. Interests, knowledge and symbolic self representation of the young users are taken into account.
• Live collection: the young user is not passive, but an active creator of content. By allowing their content to become part of the library, we are communicating to them that their experiences are just as valuable as others. The collection of the library becomes alive.
• Treat the entire discovery as a never ending game.

The outcome is a platform-game that begins by asking symbolic questions to youth. These questions create a symbolic profile that represents this young person and has the aim of customizing the content that is shown to them throughout the game.

Throughout the phases the difficulty increases, and more creativity and authorship is required from youth. At the end of the game, the player is acknowledged as a creator, and has gone through a process of learning that stimulates learning through the creation process.

The most important strategic idea we took was to transform the game into a platform. It allows not only young people to create their own games (something that surfaced during the immersion phase as a big dream for many young people), but also allows teachers from anywhere in the country to create more compelling learning games for youth. Everything can be customized, which expands the reach and transformation of the solution to a huge community.

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