Paper short abstract:

This paper takes short films as a vantage point to explore drifting in an app co-design project with youth in Vienna. While drifting, defiant data leak and linger beyond methodological boundaries in an encounter that enables inclusive, multimodal modes of knowledge production and mutual learning.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most impactful moments during our interdisciplinary participatory design project ensued when we screened “Anormal”, a short film created by a 17-year-old research participant. However, this was a significant moment with a twist – the film seemingly had little in common with our project theme. We:Design, the project in question, aimed to a) explore digital inequalities young Viennese people face in accessing the job market and b) to develop a low-threshold open-source job application app with and for young people. The task that prompted “Anormal” was to create short films on young people’s experiences of applying. Instead, “Anormal” evolved into a poetic mediation on coming-of-age, where job applications were just a side note. However, there was undoubtedly something powerful about the filmmaker’s drift, perhaps precisely because it emerged from these personal images that demanded attention and were not rendered invisible by the researcher arriving at a polished conclusion in the academic text, while discarding the data that refuses to fit in. By drifting in a creative sense, the filmmaker playfully reclaimed the narrative and temporality of the process. In this paper, I argue how the film “leaked” (Ingold 2011) and continues to linger in an encounter of mutual learning. The inclusion of embodied, fractal and multimodal forms of knowledge production, such as the short film format, can help engage diverse participants in accessible, open-ended, multimodal modes of co-creation that are sensitive to their pace and meaningful to them (Pink et al. 2022, Raman and French 2022).