#11: First Intervention – Paper Flower Talkshop

It’s been an eventful summer, coming out of lockdown into festival season was somewhat challenging, but attending Camp Bestival Festival at the end of July gave me a chance to get my paper flower intervention out on the road. Working as part of Spinney Hollow in the green craft area, I packed up my little gypsy wagon and set up camp in the grounds of Lulworth Castle in Dorset.

Over three days I interviewed ten people, going through the process of teaching them how to make the paper flower whilst asking them questions about their life. I asked them about how they grew up, what kind of lessons about themselves they learnt or were taught. We then went on to talk more about their current outlook, about how those stories about ourselves can change and how they manage that change. I made sure to share stories from my own life to encourage an atmosphere of trust and vulnerability. I was aiming to learn how to foster an environment that would allow me to establish a connection with my participant. I was also hoping to learn more about what makes them feel connected.

There were certainly some success achieved; I managed to find some kind of connection with each participant, some of which felt quite intimate and personal, some participants felt comfortable sharing the details of parts of their life that they have struggled with and the journey they have taken which was a very rewarding experience.

At the end of the intervention all the participants stated that they had enjoyed the chat, some went as far as saying that they found it quite moving, one person even commented that they had said things in our talk that they had never said out loud before. This was a key success of the intervention and exactly the kind of feeling I was hoping to create. Because I was mainly interviewing people who were also working in the green craft area I had the fortune to speak to the participants again a day or two later and a few told me that they were still pondering the things we spoke about in the talkshop.

I think this intervention was an important step in the process, it has been valuable to learn and practise the techniques of establishing a connection with someone I don’t know and reassuring to know that our connection had allowed them to open up and consider themselves and their perspective. But I couldn’t help but feel after a while that the intervention was not nearly ambitious enough, it wasn’t really testing any specific ideas, rather it was just a general exercise in connection and as a result it didn’t seem to be able to effect any significant long term change in the wellbeing of my participants.

I can conclude that I need to push myself to be more specific in my aims if I am going to effect any change. To that end I am considering changing my research question to get more specific in my next intervention.