bûffl: Interactive Illustration for a Youth Loneliness Awareness Campaign
As part of my undergraduate experience at the University of Plymouth, I participated in a collaborative project titled bûffl, an interactive digital pet game and exhibition prototype aimed at addressing loneliness among young people. This project brought together a multidisciplinary team, including myself as a media artist, working in tandem with collaborators from design and computing disciplines. Our core objective was to explore how symbolic creativity, when thoughtfully applied, could serve not just as entertainment but as a gentle intervention into the social and emotional lives of our target users—young people aged 7 to 16.
At the heart of the project was the app itself, which invited users to form a daily routine by interacting with a spirit animal. These animals, personalised digital companions, provided emotional support and habit-forming tasks such as feeding, walking, entertaining, and sleeping. These were designed to parallel acts of self-care. The app also included reflective elements, encouraging users to check in with their mood and express their feelings.
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Manchester Campaign
In addition to app illustration, I led the visual campaign for bûffl’s Manchester Outreach Exhibition, a site-specific intervention held in partnership with Effervescent, a creative youth organisation. My contribution involved the development of illustrated promotional materials—including poster artworks, story-based visuals, and infographic-style wayfinding signage for the event. These illustrations functioned not just as branding but as mediators between the project’s therapeutic intention and its diverse audience. The feedback loop with the campaign team in Manchester challenged me to rethink my role as a “solo” artist and instead embrace visual storytelling as an open, discursive, and collaborative practice.
Importantly, bûffl also included an exhibition component. Here, we translated the digital pet game into a physical installation experience, enabling users to interact with the app in a gallery-like space. My contributions extended to poster illustration and exhibition visuals, using design techniques drawn from watercolour aesthetics and child-friendly visual languages. These decisions were informed not only by creative preference but by a desire to create a calming, therapeutic environment consistent with our app’s emotional goals.
Exhibition Component
One of the most rewarding aspects of this collaboration was observing how children engaged with my visual work in situ. During the Manchester campaign, I witnessed young users identifying with the spirit animals, asking about their names and personalities, and using them as conversational anchors. This confirmed for me that visual design, when informed by care, can open doors to dialogue, trust, and therapeutic reflection.
Ultimately, bûffl was not just an app or an exhibition—it was a response to a public health concern. In addressing youth loneliness through digital creativity and community design, I came to understand that interactive illustration could play a meaningful role in psychosocial care. Through my dual contributions—app avatar design and campaign illustration, I developed not only technical competencies in digital media but also a deeper sensitivity to the ways visual languages shape emotional experience. This project reaffirmed my belief that cross-media art can act as both a mirror and a salve for the complexities of contemporary life.