Beyond Once Upon a Time
To be honest, I walked into the villages carrying a backpack full of assumptions. I assumed the girls might find storytelling boring. I assumed I would struggle to relate to them. I assumed there would be a huge gap between their lives and mine. Some of those assumptions didn’t survive the first field visit.
It was nearly 40°C outside. Nobody knew who I was. A few girls watched me cautiously, unsure of what to make of the stranger who had suddenly appeared in their Community Learning Centre. The younger children were far more interested in running around and playing games than talking to me. The room felt awkward, conversations were slow to start, and for a while I wondered whether any of the ideas I had planned would actually work. Then, somewhere between reading a storybook with a group of children and watching the older girls slowly begin to participate, I realised something important: before you can ask people to tell stories, you need to create a space where they feel comfortable speaking at all. That realisation ended up shaping not only the workshop I was designing, but also the way I now think about design itself.
Understanding the Context
My community project is being conducted with Abhivyakti Media for Development, an organisation working in rural development across Maharashtra. What initially drew me to the organisation was its emphasis on research and long-term engagement rather than quick solutions. Through conversations with the team, I learned about programmes focused on gender awareness, youth empowerment and community learning. I was placed within the Peer Leader Programme, which works with girls and young women through Community Learning Centres (CLCs) across villages in the Trimbak region of Nashik. One thing that surprised me was that despite the organisation’s focus on education and awareness, storytelling and visual communication had not been explored extensively as engagement tools. As a design student interested in storytelling and illustration, this immediately sparked my curiosity.
Observing before Doing
My first few visits took me to villages including Sapgaon, Kachurli, Vinayaknagar, Shirasgaon and Pegalwadi. Initially, I saw these visits as opportunities to gather information for my workshop. Looking back, they became lessons in observation instead. I found myself paying attention not only to the people I met but also to the systems surrounding them.
Many younger girls did not have access to personal mobile phones, meaning information travelled largely through word-of-mouth. Attendance at sessions was often shaped by household responsibilities, access to water and family expectations. In some villages, girls arrived in groups and spoke freely. In others, conversations took much longer to emerge. One conversation about water availability particularly stayed with me. In one village, water was only available for a short period in the morning, meaning many girls began their day before sunrise helping their families collect it. It was a reminder that everyday infrastructure quietly shapes how people spend their time and what opportunities are available to them.
These observations also challenged the way I thought about participation. Before this experience, I often assumed participation was primarily about willingness. The field showed me that participation is also shaped by access, time, social expectations and circumstance. As designers, we often talk about context. During these visits, context stopped being an abstract word from classroom discussions and became something tangible.
When Assumptions Meet Reality
The biggest surprise was not how different the girls were from me, but how many assumptions I had made before meeting them. I expected storytelling activities to feel unfamiliar or uninteresting. Instead, many participants were enthusiastic about learning something new and eager to spend time doing something outside their daily routine. I also assumed there would be a large disconnect between our lives. While our circumstances differed significantly, I found many shared aspirations, concerns and curiosities. The girls I met were thoughtful, observant and often surprisingly aware of the issues affecting their communities. At the same time, I became aware of realities I rarely encounter in my own life.
During several interactions, I noticed how hesitant some girls were to express their opinions openly. Over time, it became difficult to ignore how deeply certain expectations around gender had been internalised. Speaking loudly, disagreeing openly or taking up space in a conversation did not always come naturally. I also observed limited leisure time, household responsibilities and visible social divisions between communities. Yet alongside these challenges, I saw enthusiasm, resilience and a genuine desire to learn. The field visits constantly reminded me that communities cannot be reduced to problems waiting to be solved. They are complex ecosystems filled with strengths, challenges and contradictions all at once.
Designing a Workshop, Redesigning My Approach
One of the most interesting parts of this project has been the evolution of the workshop itself. When I first began planning, I imagined conducting a workshop focused primarily on storytelling and storyboarding. However, the more time I spent observing and reflecting, the more that idea began to change. I realised that teaching storytelling was not actually my primary objective. The real objective was creating an environment where participants felt comfortable expressing opinions, sharing experiences and engaging creatively without fear of judgement. Along with that I wanted the girls to create something they could call their own whilst also contributing to the education of their own community. That shift changed the entire direction of the project. The workshop gradually expanded to include storytelling circles, media interpretation activities, drawing exercises and collaborative story-building. As the sessions began, the workshop started revealing things I had not anticipated.
Rather than beginning with technical skills, I began thinking about confidence, participation and comfort. In many ways, the project became less about teaching people how to tell stories and more about helping them recognise that their stories were already worth telling.
This process reminded me of concepts introduced during my first year as a design student. Ideas such as observation, empathy and iteration often appear as frameworks in the classroom. Through this project, I began to understand how messy, human and unpredictable those concepts become in practice. Designing for people is very different from designing with people. The distinction seems small on paper but feels enormous in reality.
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One of the first activities involved asking participants to create characters from unexpected objects, animals and everyday things. A banana became a character. A rat became a character. Some participants drew creatures inspired by cartoons and media they were already familiar with. Once the characters were created, we cut them into separate heads, bodies and feet and mixed them together to create entirely new combinations.
What began as a playful exercise quickly became an observation about creativity itself. The younger girls in Kachurli often embraced absurdity without hesitation, transforming ordinary objects into imaginative characters and enthusiastically experimenting with unusual combinations. The older participants in Pegalwadi, on the other hand, frequently gravitated towards more familiar figures such as dolls, girls or characters they had encountered through media.
Rather than seeing this as a difference in artistic ability, I began to view it as a difference in creative confidence. The younger girls seemed less concerned about whether their ideas were “correct”, while the older participants often appeared more conscious of producing something recognisable or aesthetically pleasing.
The next activity focused on collaborative storytelling. I began each story with a single sentence and asked the participants to continue it one line at a time. What followed was one of the most revealing parts of the workshop.
In Kachurli, the stories quickly moved into imaginative territory. Non-human characters appeared naturally, strange situations unfolded, and the girls seemed comfortable building upon each other’s ideas. In Pegalwadi, however, a different pattern emerged. Although I encouraged participants to experiment with fantasy and fictional characters, many of the stories remained deeply rooted in real-life conflicts and social issues. Themes such as difficult family relationships, community disputes and village tensions repeatedly appeared throughout their narratives.
Initially, I expected storytelling activities to produce purely imaginative outcomes. Instead, I realised that stories often reflect the realities people encounter every day. Even when participants were given complete creative freedom, many returned to themes that felt familiar, relevant or emotionally significant to them.
Another observation emerged through conversations about local folklore and village stories. Many of the stories shared by the girls were not simply forms of entertainment. They functioned as warnings, cautionary tales or lessons passed down through generations. Stories about ghosts, dangerous places or mysterious figures often carried underlying messages about safety, behaviour and social expectations.
This made me reflect on the role stories play within communities. Stories do not simply entertain. They carry values, fears, memories and lived experiences. They become a way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.
As the workshops progressed, my goal gradually shifted. Rather than encouraging participants to move away from the stories they already knew, I wanted to expand the range of possibilities available to them. I wanted them to feel that a character could be a banana, a tree, a sparrow or even a village building. A story could begin with reality, but it could also move into humour, fantasy, speculation or complete absurdity.
What This Experience Taught Me About Design
Perhaps the biggest lesson from this experience has been understanding the role of sensitivity in design. Before this project, I often thought about design through the lens of outcomes. Posters, illustrations, campaigns and publications felt like the obvious endpoints of the process. Community engagement has pushed me to think differently. Sometimes the most important thing a designer can create is not an artefact but a space. A space for conversation. A space for participation. A space where people feel comfortable enough to contribute their thoughts and experiences.
The field visits also forced me to confront my own privilege. Despite being close in age to many of the participants, our realities are vastly different. I have access to time, resources and opportunities that I often take for granted. Meeting girls my age who navigate entirely different responsibilities made me reflect on how unevenly those opportunities are distributed. At the same time, I found myself constantly inspired by the participants’ enthusiasm. Some of the most rewarding moments came from watching girls become excited about a book, a conversation or a simple activity. Those moments reminded me why participation matters.
What surprised me most was how much storytelling revealed.
I entered the project thinking stories were things people created. By the end of these sessions, I realised stories are also things people carry. The themes that emerged in the workshops weren’t random. They reflected everyday experiences, concerns, warnings and observations that already existed within the communities.
In Kachurli, I saw how freely imagination could flourish when participants felt comfortable experimenting. In Pegalwadi, I saw how strongly real-life issues shaped the stories participants chose to tell. Neither approach was right or wrong. Both revealed something meaningful about the people creating them.
The experience also changed the way I think about creativity. Before conducting the workshops, I often saw imagination as an individual skill. Now I see it as something deeply connected to environment, confidence and opportunity. The more comfortable participants became, the more willing they were to take creative risks, build on one another’s ideas and explore unexpected possibilities.
As the project moves towards becoming a collective storybook, I find myself thinking less about the final artefact and more about the process that created it. The most valuable outcome may not be the stories themselves, but the conversations, observations and moments of self expression that made those stories possible.
I’ve learned in my design education that design is not really about moving toward solutions; it’s about listening. This project has taught me that listening is only the beginning. Sometimes, if you listen carefully enough, people will tell you stories that reveal far more than you ever thought to ask.
