At the Cowichan Valley School District’s Indigenous Student Leadership conference, eighty youth from across the Cowichan Valley gathered at Vancouver Island University to explore wellness, resilience, and cultural celebration. The day featured stories from Indigenous role models and hands-on workshops ranging from cedar weaving to language revitalization. We worked closely with the student leadership group to ensure the day’s visuals reflected their unique interests and passions.
To ground the event in the local landscape, we constructed a nine-foot cedar tree and students added their goals, dreams, and inspirations to the branches, creating a collective “thriving tree.”
Alongside this, we graphic recorded the day’s dialogues in real-time on a large-scale knowledge wall titled “Go with the Flow”, and to bring an innovative edge to the session, we enabled the graphics with Augmented Reality (AR), allowing the students to interact with the artwork through their devices.
These interactive pieces now serve as a vibrant, multi-dimensional record of the students’ strength and their vision for the future of their community.