Illustrating youth vernaculars & learning through arts-based research

This project explores the vernacular architectures and axiologies of youth who represent the Global Majority in a 3-week summer design-build programme. Through a visual ethnographic approach of the design-build programme hosted by a university in the Pacific Northwest, high school age youth opted into learning architectural design, carpentry, and metal work. Using photographic data, digital field notes, interview data and b-roll, I use a collage analysis and the concept of layering to interweave narrative, materiality, and representation across modalities to explain youth’s cultural expressions through drawings, aesthetics, and built form. Youth designed pollinator villages embodying personal and ecological stories, revealing values of care, kinship, and community. Layering surfaces and meanings, this analysis offers insight into emergent cultural spatialities and the transformative potential of design education to better support youth’s ongoing knowledge production as a process of facilitating relations.