Visual Voice:Exploring Youths’ Visual Design Thinking Through Visual Literacy

This research aims to enhance youth’s visual design thinking (VDT) skills through the frequent use of visual literacy (VL). By emphasizing the importance of arts based research (ABR), this research provides youth with a platform to explore their creative potential and generate new ideas for addressing societal issues. The research found that encouraging youth to express their feelings and perceptions through arts-based interventions was essential to their creative development. This research presents the results of an artistic experiment conducted on a small group of youths from Rovaniemi, Finland. The research was conducted at the University of Lapland, Finland, under the project Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS), a Horizon 2020–2023-funded research project. There has been no examination or discussion of visual literacy (VL) awareness through studies focusing only on arts-based methods (ABMs) that facilitate the integration of artistic and personal inquiry. This research contributes to filling this gap by exploring the main question that encompasses this fundamental research: How can the visual design thinking (VDT) skills of youth be improved through visual literacy (VL)? This research question was analysed in five publications from different perspectives, providing validation through multiple perspectives. The first publication investigates the connection between creative processes and the visual literacy (VL) of youth. The second publication discusses the interpretive role of documentation in the context of artistic co-creation processes. The third publication explores the role of participatory arts-based methods (ABMs) in expressing pluralist values in youth. The fourth publication examines how to enhance children’s visual Design Thinking (VDT) skills using the prototype VDT model. Lastly, the fifth publication validates that youth’s creativity can be boosted through frequent visual literacy (VL) engagement. During working on the five publications, the research was designed in order to ...