What Matters to Our Children?

A data visualisation poster for Playeum's report on what 201 young children in Singapore care about, supported by the LEGO Group.

Playuem

Partner:

Playuem

Project type:

Infographic

Scope:

Data visualisation
Design
Research

See it live

What do Singapore's children care most about? Peace, pollution, Pokémon, and much more. When children as young as three are given the time and tools to share their ideas, the result is not a tidy list of themes. It is a rich, specific, and often surprising record of what they see in the world and what they hope will change.

About the project

A data visualisation poster created in collaboration with Playeum for their children's voices report What Matters to Our Children?, supported by the LEGO Group. The report is based on a play-based research project that engaged 201 children aged 3 to 14 across ten workshop sessions in Singapore, inviting them to share their ideas through LEGO bricks, drawings, written notes, and conversations.

The challenge

Visualising voices without flattening them

The data came from children speaking in their own words, through their own methods. The responses were imaginative, messy, and deeply individual. Our challenge was to present the dataset with structure and clarity, without reducing its texture or their insight to a single metric. The visualisation had to carry the specificity of what the children said, not just the categories their responses could be grouped into.

Holding space for an advocacy goal

The report was not just a record. It was a tool Playeum could use to push for children's voices to be taken seriously in policy, media, and community decision-making. The poster had to do more than summarise findings. It had to help adult audiences understand that young children are present-day thinkers, not future adults, and invite them to listen.

Our creative solution

We designed for diversity rather than reduction. Rather than summarising responses into bar charts or neat categories, we created a kaleidoscopic infographic that mirrors the complexity of the children’s voices—each visual element tied to themes, audiences, and sentiments. The visuals are accompanied by a selection of quotes, which show the amount of detail and specificity in the children's responses—one child built her own version of the United Nations!

The work was co-developed with Playeum from the start. We worked closely with their team to understand their facilitation methods, their audiences, and their long-term advocacy goals, not just the dataset. As the project evolved, we stayed in dialogue, surfacing unexpected insights and refining focus areas so the poster would serve the report's larger purpose. The final piece functions as both an entry point to the report and a standalone artefact that invites adults to sit with what the children said.

Our partners

Playeum is an independent registered charity with a strong social mission: to champion children of all backgrounds and abilities to be active citizens, through play and the arts.

You’ve done the work. Now let us make it exceptional.