Arts-ED has been bringing diverse youths together since 2001 through community-based arts and culture programmes. Our programmes encourage inter-cultural interaction and transmission through creating a variety of platforms for youths to engage with each other and the community around them. This year, we wanted to further strengthen the critical thinking element of our youth programmes by incorporating intergroup dialogue to encourage a critical understanding of social identities.

Once we looped in Goh Choon Ean, a local tabletop game designer as our artist programmer, Borak Bansan was born! It is a Youth Arts Camp 2.0 in which we all agreed that we have accomplished multiple firsts. 

First time integrating three (instead of two) main components

With this, Borak Bansan focused on local wet markets as learning sites for participants aged 17 to 23 to explore their own social identities and how social identities affect people’s lived experiences, conducted research into what makes an inclusive market, and incorporated their insights into the creation of original tabletop games.

First time running a mostly virtual programme with older youths

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant challenges to our team in running Borak Bansan. First and foremost, schools were closed. Hence, we turned to social media and the team’s social networks to promote Borak Bansan to a slightly older youth (between the age of 17 to 23) whom we thought had more flexibility in joining a programme like this in the middle of a pandemic.

The original face-to-face Borak Bansan programme also shifted to mostly virtual platforms due to the pandemic. We had to constantly think out of the box to create a conducive learning space that encouraged authentic connections with the site and among the people involved in Borak Bansan.

Before the start of the programme, we personally delivered ‘Borak Bansan survival kits’ to our participants that included items such as a journal book, a T-Shirt, a few board game cards, and some goodies from the local market.

We played a variety of tabletop games on Tabletopia (a virtual platform for tabletop games) to interact with and get to know each other while learning about different game mechanics used by game designers.

Despite limitations in terms of site interactions, we tried bringing local markets into our virtual sessions by utilizing audio and video footage captured in the local markets. Through careful exploration and analysis, our participants explored the demographics and identified interactions among users in the market.

Through a market self-experience activity, our participants familiarized themselves with the site by going to neighbourhood markets to buy ingredients and complete a list of tasks individually. With an emphasis on the five senses, they reflected on the people, place, and use of the neighbourhood markets that they visited.

To identify the characteristics of what makes an inclusive local market, our participants went on the ground to conduct site research in groups. To supplement their findings onsite, they also conducted some online research and participated in a virtual role-playing activity to strengthen their understanding of local markets.

First time pushing participant to think critically about social identities through intergroup dialogue

According to Win Wen (a trained IGD facilitator who is also the programmer and facilitator of Borak Bansan), part of the intergroup dialogue (IGD) is building awareness of our own and others’ social identities, like race, socioeconomic class, religion, age, gender, etc. but importantly, it’s thinking about these as not just “culture” or just general characteristics, but as shaped by systems or structures that create and maintain inequality (e.g. policy, institutions, how we organize hierarchies). It is like 2 sides of a coin, some people end up on the top with privilege, others, the oppressed, are at the bottom, as shown in the diagrams below.

We continuously challenged our participants to move beyond their comfort zone so that they can open themselves to new challenges, knowledge, and awareness.

Our participants also used self-mapping and the social identity wheel to understand their own social identities. By sharing these with each other, they reflected on the various ways our social identities become obvious and impact our daily life experiences.

To piece things together with the other components of site research and tabletop game design, we built on our dialogue and discussions about social identities by exploring what inclusivity means using the overarching framework of AIR - Accessibility, Inclusivity, Representation - that we developed for Borak Bansan.

These continuous critical reflections using the AIR Framework were key to analysing and interpreting data our participants collected in the local markets to figure out what makes an inclusive market, and in unpacking what inclusivity means in the tabletop games that they designed.

The majority of our participants expressed that even though they have joined other virtual programmes before, they had not participated in a virtual programme similar to Borak Bansan where critical thinking was integral to all the components within the programme.

Participants’ creative output

The process of designing a tabletop game about inclusive markets was the creative synthesis part of the programme where the participants incorporated their data and insights into their game design. By the end of Borak Bansan, our participants successfully designed two digital prototypes of tabletop games with a focus on inclusivity in local markets. 

The first prototype was Talk & Taste. This game highlighted the role of language proficiency in navigating the local markets. In this game, players gain proficiency in different languages as they interact with different people in the local market to be able to communicate with vendors and buy food.

The second prototype was Everyone’s Market. This game highlighted the role of customers in sustaining the local markets. In this game, players try to be regular customers in the local markets to be able to contribute and help sustain the local market in different ways.  

These two digital prototypes of tabletop games about inclusivity in local markets resulted from our continuous dialogue on the impact of social identities on daily lives, research in several local markets around Penang island, and discovering together what inclusivity is and why inclusivity is important in a place like a local market. 

So, what is inclusivity?

For one of the participants, “Inclusivity is something everyone talks about but doesn’t actually really know. Through this program, I learned that inclusivity is not just about representation – like who is represented or representing everyone – but also in terms of accessibility and interactions between people.” – Ong Khai Peng, 22

For Borak Bansan facilitators, it was also a consistent challenge to create a learning space that was inclusive for our diverse participants. As Borak Bansan strives to be as interactive as possible by utilising multiple digital platforms, that also meant that the technical barriers were relatively high despite our effort in providing digital equipment and internet subsidy. As our space was confined to a flat-screen, that limited our usage of body languages and increased our reliance on verbal and written languages, especially when it came to dialogues and discussions.

Through Borak Bansan, we realized that inclusivity is a long and continuous process. While there is no one formula on how to be inclusive, it is important that we do not stop critically reflecting, and challenging ourselves and each other by creating space for people to dialogue and share ideas. As we slowly adjust into a new normal, we hope to continue building authentic connections with the place and the people that we interact with, physically or virtually, in order to keep those conversations going. 

Reported by: Kong Yi Fen | 21 October 2021

This intergroup-dialogue programme for youths is made possible by our partners, Davis Projects for Peace & Luma.