Information Workshops I: Twisting Balloon Animals (Winter)

Section Description

Balloon-animal twisting is an embodied information practice that involves the sensory-motor system of a twister in complex forms of eye-hand coordination and proprioception (awareness of the position and movement of the body). When done by an adult twister with a child as the recipient, it can be enacted in a spirit of child-centered learning about animals that boosts the young person’s confidence, critical thinking, and creativity. Students of this Workshop will master a menagerie of balloon animal forms; gain necessary, concomitant social intelligences for their production in an educational, microsocial context; and ultimately grasp the potential of balloon-animal twisting to fortify information institutions and the public good. Given the Workshop’s home within a Master of Information program, balloon-animal twisting will be approached via the aforementioned theoretical frameworks of embodied information practice and child-centered learning; and, it will be further illuminated through the timely lenses of the multispecies movement, the Serious Leisure Perspective, and artistic activism. Beyond its walls and enrollment, this Workshop aims to diversify the Faculty of Information’s curriculum, through its unconventional nexus of a whimsical craft that can likewise be personally, socially, and informationally meaningful.

Current Timetable