NEWSROOM

Unleash your stories – Youth Butterflies

What if your shirt could tell a story about your background and experiences? That’s exactly what Yobithan Rajaratnam has enabled through his social enterprise Youth Butterflies, launched on 20 June 2019 – World Refugee Day.

Yobithan’s story

Youth Butterflies aims to give a voice to young people, in particular refugees and minority groups.  It enables them to share their stories via the medium of T-shirt design, supplemented by augmented reality. Each T-shirt design reflects the story of someone’s life experiences, and by scanning a QR code on the T-shirt itself, their story is further expanded through interactive content in augmented reality.

The idea for Youth Butterflies comes from Yobi’s own experience as a refugee, as well as from youth workers sharing their stories during workshops at Mangere Refugee Resettlement Camp. Through this experience, Yobi saw the power of storytelling and wanted to find innovative ways for people to share and connect with these stories.

Using the facilities at Unleash Space has been very helpful for the prototyping and development of Yobi’s T-shirts. The laser cutter in the Maker Space allowed Yobi to cut frames in scale to help with mass production of these T-shirts. Yobi also found the creative technologists in the Maker Space very helpful and friendly, offering advice, answering questions and introducing Yobi to more advanced tools that could be used in his project. Just chatting to them helped Yobi’s idea evolve into a working product and business.