Keeping it Wild Blog 1 - Solly

Keeping it Wild Blog 1 - Solly

 

The summer in England is usually busy and full of life, from the birds singing all morning, the flowers are in full bloom and everyone is outdoors enjoying the sunshine. Summer 2020 is very unusual as since the virus hit, there have not been many opportunities to go out and enjoy the summer. Per government advice, we all have been instructed to stay home and keep our distance. In lieu of this, Keeping It Wild will be virtual, taking place entirely in the hub-world that we have created. This blog series will chronical this project, from the beginning planning stages until the end when all the projects are completed. This project is headed by both Autus and the London Youth team.

The project's aim is to normalize nature and the outdoors as a thing young autistic people can do. For many reasons young autistic people don't interact with nature as much and that can be for many reasons as in sensory overload, anxiety and the proximity of nature in their hometown. Keeping it Wild's aim is to make nature friendly and calming and also make a creative portal within the virtual world that Autus is hosted in. 

For research and for putting their pictures up on a virtual gallery, the team each joined the project's Flickr group to display the pictures they took outside of various goings-on in nature. As we all live all over the world, the gallery will have a lot of interesting additions. My favourite thing of nature is taking pictures of all the birds just going along their lives, seeing them sing is a marvel.

Keeping it Wild first meetingIn the first week, the group gathered around a gazebo in the virtual world to discuss our plans and goals going forward with the project. For many of the team who were experienced with building 3D objects in the virtual world, they set themselves a task to build objects that you might find outside in nature, such as hedgehog houses, bins and composters. Hopefully by the end of the project, they will have built together a replica of outside nature! My task in this is to blog about the goings on of this project as I am not that well versed in building 3D objects! My wish for this project is that I can chronicle everyone's journey and by the end it will be published for everyone to see how Keeping it Wild came out. I am really looking forward to seeing how it will all shape up.

 - Solly, blogger for Keeping it Wild