The (new) uses of enchantment: a framework for co-creating social purpose advertising with young people

Young people who have encountered challenging experiences are often motivated to assist others in similar situations. However, they frequently feel disempowered by co-creation workshops that are dominated by adult-centric methods (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Rousell, 2020) and "tokenistic" (McMellon and Tisdall, 2020, p.160) activities requiring advanced linguistic skills (Bragg, 2010). The onto-epistemologies of young people encompass emotion, play, enchantment, and imagination (Dunn and Mellor, 2017, p.288; Harris, 2013, p.40; Steele, 2013, p.540). For youth co-creation to thrive, methodologies must align with these realms of knowledge (Ergler, 2017, p.240). Such approaches are urgently needed (Dunn and Mellor, 2017, p.288).

This research asks how facilitators can engage young people’s knowledge domains of imagination and enchantment to uncover insights and creative ideas and what project methodologies optimise young people’s agency to co-create social-purpose campaigns. The study employs two case studies in which teenagers co-create national-scale campaigns about loneliness and image-based abuse. Co-creators describe the workshops as like journeying through a parallel universe, referring to transformations, transmutations, and resurrections with fairytale- or fantastical qualities. The theme of ‘enchantment’ links these experiences.

Therefore, the study draws on play and depth-hermeneutics methods and a theoretical lens of enchantment to understand the co-creators’ experiences of a set of social-purpose advertising workshops led by the author. It provides a ‘Framework for Enchantment’ comprising project designs, tools, guidelines for reflexive and emergent facilitation, and a collective leadership model. This framework addresses critical gaps in the co-creation literature regarding systems to engage young people’s imaginative, symbolic, emotional and enchanted domains of knowledge, techniques to support young people in synthesising collective creative insights and ideas, and project designs which support young people’s agency and meaningful engagement. Whilst this has been tested through social purpose advertising development, it is potentially relevant to the wider design community, including design futures, product and service design, experience design, play design and education design.