Projects
Our projects bring together creative health, participatory design, and community-led practice. Each project is shaped through collaboration, exploring shared experience, generating insight, and creating pathways for change.
GOB Young Voices
Curious Collective is the creative research and development partner for GOB: Goddexes of Beatbox. GOB is a new beatboxing theatre show that centres trans+, non-binary, gender-marginalised and neurodivergent voices. GOB is developed in consultation with young adults facing marginalisation and led by SK Shlomo, the international beatbox star, disability and mental health ambassador. GYV (GOB Young Voices), is GOB’s accompanying youth strand that embeds youth voice directly into the show’s development while co-designing a longer-term arts and health programme with young adults from marginalised identities. In practice, GYV pays and supports young adults (aged 16-25) who are trans+, non-binary and gender-marginalised, to contribute creative input, develop skills, earn and lead, shaping both the show’s direction and the blueprint for GYV’s longer term vision. GOB: More info.
Radical Research
Radical Research directly challenges the extractive research practices that have historically excluded communities who are marginalised from knowledge production. Using Radical Participatory Design, the Radical Research Group centred young women aged 11 to17 and their health priorities. Everyone involved was a local community member with authority over every phase of the programme. Structural equity was built in from the start with ‘recognition through remuneration’ for everyone who took part. The group collectively decided to remove deficit-framing language, including the term “mental health,” from their shared spaces. The result was an exploratory and replicable approach to community-led health research that centred young people facing marginalisation as authors of their care.
Collective Imagination
Collective Imagination piloted a place-based model of exploration with young people from an intersectional urban community. Using arts, conversation, and making, the group imagined alternative futures connected to systems of health, education, and care. In discussion sessions 20 young people defined their own curriculum priorities, naming mental health, self-care, life skills, and financial literacy as central to their educational experience. The project produced posters, mindmaps and a co-curated zine as community artifacts, whilst laying the foundation for future place-based collective imagination work. Find out more about Collective Imagination.
Affiliate Projects
Connecting Care
As part of the Civic Futures Fellowship, a member of Curious Collective was involved in the Connecting Care Project. Curious Collective’s Care Corner and creative resources were adapted for the purposes of the project and were featured at the main event and in the zine. Connecting Care started with a question: what does care actually feel like, and who is holding it for everyone else? Over six months facilitators, artists, and community organisers designed a project in response to this question. The main event in April 2025 brought around 30 people together for an evening of creative mapping, storytelling, a sound bath, and shared food. Some of the insights: care lives in small moments, the change-maker community is exhausted, and people are hungry for spaces where they don’t have to perform. To share insights, the project made a zine, a microsite, a digital care map, and a policy guide. Find out more about Connecting Care.
