Zines
If all else fails, there’s always print or web zines. ―Rudy Rucker
👥 Serves: 10-30 people
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: 1.5 hours
🥣 Ingredients: Coloured paper (have enough sheets of paper for each participant), pens, markers, stickers (and any other crafty material you may want to use), post-its, 2 runners
💪 Nutritional values: Harvesting, Creativity, Team building, Connection, Reflection
Zines
📝 Description
A mini-pamphlet to harvest and capture meaning.
Zines (pronunciation: “zeens,” short for “magazines”) are small, independent publications in the form of mini-pamphlet or magazines. They are easy and inexpensive to make and are a great creative tool to capture the experience for a particular event, gathering, or community. Creating a zine with your team or event participants is a powerful and rewarding way to unleash creativity whilst capturing the essence of the group and gathering. It is also a useful tool for people involved to harvest their experience and absorb it fully.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Gathering ideas (15’)
Hand out a few post-its or slips of paper to the participants and ask them to jot down key moments from the experience, breakthroughs, things they enjoyed, powerful concepts, etc. One insight per post-it. They should do this by themselves and in silence.
As they start jotting down ideas, ask two volunteers to help us as runners to pick up the various post-its and cluster them in relevant groups on a wall. Once all post-its are up, briefly read out the main clusters so that everyone has an idea of what is there.
Step 2 – Creating groups (5’)
Let participants self-organise into small groups where each of them takes on a cluster or two and prepares a few pages for the zine.
Step 3 – Creating the pages (40’)
Hand out the coloured paper, pens, markers, and other crafty materials to each group so they can prepare their pages. Remind them that they can be as creative as they wish: the zine can contain poems and songs, graphs and charts, concepts and ideas, drawings and infographics.
Step 4 – Collecting the pages (15’)
Collect all the pages and place them onto the floor so that the group can decide on the order for the zine.
Step 5 – Copying and sharing (15’)
Once the zine has been finalised, you can copy it and share it with all participants (either physically or digitally is fine). Now everyone has a creative memory of the experience you went through together!