Tools to enhance life at home

At Stand + Stare we are getting used to remote ways of working. Thankfully, videoconferencing works fine for a number of our tasks and chatting one-to-one is almost akin to being in the studio together. Like a lot of people in the creative / cultural sector, we’ve had a bunch of projects put on hold, some cancelled and luckily some that are continuing, albeit in different ways.

We’ve been working with Dr Lucy Kelly at The University of Bristol, and with the Brigstow Institute to widen the research for our ‘Re-imagining the Diary’ project, which means more people can now access our diary toolkit to support their wellbeing during lockdown. We’ve adapted the toolkit into a downloadable PDF, which you can print out and use as a series of prompts and creative explorations each day to explore your thoughts and feelings. The first iteration of our diary toolkit showed that it had a positive effect on wellbeing for 93% of participants. If you’d like to be part of our current research group testing the toolkit, please sign up via the Brigstow website.

With so much of our lives going online at the moment, it’s nice to spend some time walking, taking in local surroundings on daily exercise or maybe capturing snippets of your day in a sound recording. Our Mayfly Sound app is a great way to document your thoughts and ideas during lockdown as you can combine photos, drawings, notes and sound recordings in the app and connect your recordings to the delicate mayfly illustrations in our special Jotter notebooks. With the Mayfly sound stickers, it’s easy to make an audible treasure hunt for the kids or an interactive greeting card for a loved one!

We’ve always championed the combination of digital technology with physical experiences and are currently working to re-appropriate one of our apps for people living in social isolation. Stay tuned for more info about that soon!

While we’ve been spending so much time at home recently, we’ve also been updating our website - Have you noticed? Take a look around and let us know what you think! Over the next few months we will be adding some more material to the website and packages to download, so please do explore it and check back now and then to see what’s new.

We are making the best of working from home, but we are also really looking forward to a time when we can work in communities again, when we can interact with our collaborators in person and explore museums and archives in all their multi-sensory glory. Until that time comes, we are committed to exploring what we can continue to reach people safely at home.

Deb Hoy, Creative Producer